Jimin Kang’s debut novel, Lessons in Attention, is an intimate, atmospheric story about disappearance, identity, faith, and belonging. Following Brazilian translator Lua as she searches for her missing friend Toby, the novel moves across continents as Lua confronts what it means to leave homes and loved ones behind while searching for a place to belong.
Kang is a writer whose work explores questions of home, migration, and identity. Lessons in Attention will be published by Tin House on June 22, 2027.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Lessons in Attention, designed by Maura Intemann. Below, Kang and Intemann discuss the novel’s recurring water imagery, the geographies that shape Lua’s journey, and how collage became a way to capture a character whose sense of self stretches across places, cultures, and lives.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I envisioned a landscape, something sparse and atmospheric. I really like covers in which a built or natural environment mirrors someone’s interior world, and there is a lot of contemplation—not to mention cities and grassy expanses!—in the novel.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
It was fascinating to observe what others noticed about my novel that I may have missed. Only when I saw Maura’s first cover design did I reflect on how significant water is in the novel, both literally (the Thames in England, the famous Encontro das Águas in Amazonas, the Akerselva in Oslo…) and figuratively, as a glue between continents, or as a way of being (as in that line by Bruce Lee: be water, my friend). So that was a really wonderful, and appreciated, observation on part of Maura and the team at Tin House. The water imagery followed us from the beginning to the end as other elements—like the outlined figure and the title text—went through several iterations, and when Maura included the meeting of the Rio Negro and Rio Solimões (or, the Encontro das Águas) as part of the figure herself, I knew we had landed on the final cover.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Above all, I felt very lucky to have worked with a designer and a publishing team who had read and observed my novel so closely. And of course, like any other debut writer would say, it was incredible to see my novel exist in a form beyond a Word document!
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
First, there’s formlessness: the figure is there, but faceless, as if she’s disappearing. Lessons in Attention opens with a man who goes missing, so disappearance is, at the most superficial level, a core theme. But there are other kinds of disappearances too: what it means to be so culturally and physically dispersed that you feel you are constantly disappearing to loved ones; what it means to leave a home, or multiple, behind; how in disappearing to yourself—in, say, a meditative silence—you are led to meet parts of yourself you didn’t yet know.
Then there’s the element of geography. One detail I loved learning from my publishing team was that the water images were sourced from bodies of water in several of the different places—America, England, Brazil, Korea, Norway…—where the novel takes place. So the cover is an embodied reflection of the geographies that make up Lua’s quest to find Toby, and by doing so, to figure out what home means for herself.
And Maura, can you speak to designing this book cover?
There are so many compelling, unique elements of this book that made me excited to dive into the assignment. The main character, Lua, is a Brazilian translator living in Oxford, and she’s also lived in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Korea. She has an estranged relationship with her evangelical mother. Her friend Toby, whose disappearance on a research trip is the central mystery of the novel, has spent his entire life in Oxford, where he’s a deeply rooted member of the Quaker community. Jimin Kang’s writing is so intimate and atmospheric, and she dives deep into questions about faith, identity, and belonging. I thought a collage would be a good way to bring together all the rich material and complexities of this novel. My initial collages had photographs arranged in concentric circles, inspired by the way Quakers sit during meetings and the way water ripples out when you touch it (various bodies of water are important in the book—the Cherwell and Thames rivers in Oxford, the Amazon and Rio Negro in Brazil). Many of my initial ideas featured an image of a young man, sometimes obscured by other photographs and sometimes as a cut-out silhouette to represent Toby’s vanishing. When we shared a version of that cover to Jimin, she rightfully pointed out that while Toby’s disappearance drives the plot, Lua is really the heart of the book—her thoughts and experiences propel the narrative. I made a new version with Lua as the central figure, her body is comprised of collaged images of water from the places that have made her who she is. The main image shows the Rio Negro and the Amazon meeting to create the Solimões, based on a passage I loved from the story: “as if my past and present lives finally settled into each other like two rivers joining into a sea.” I loved getting to work on this beautiful debut novel, and I’m excited for readers to dive into it.