Keep Your Enemies Close, the debut novel by Doris W. Cheng, is a biting, darkly funny exploration of family, identity, and assimilation. Struggling to finish her dissertation, Connie Wang finds herself increasingly resentful of her overbearing Taiwanese immigrant mother and desperate to escape her past. But when her boyfriend suggests cutting ties with her family, Connie begins questioning whether she can ever truly separate herself from where she came from.
Cheng is a Taiwanese American writer and editor whose work has appeared in Boston Review, Shenandoah, and New Orleans Review. She is also the fiction editor of Bellevue Literary Review. Deep Vellum will publish Keep Your Enemies Close on August 3, 2027.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Keep Your Enemies Close, designed by Nicole Caputo. Below, Cheng discusses her love of bold illustrations, the decision to feature a crocodile and a falling house sparrow, and how the cover captures the novel’s sharp humor and complicated power dynamics.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
My book is narrated by a big personality, a protagonist who’s smart and funny and brutally honest. While I didn’t have any specific ideas, I knew I wanted the cover to be as bold as the voice.
I love illustrated art, and artwork featuring animals. I also wanted to convey a sense of humor – to indicate that, though the book deals with serious themes, it does so with irreverently, with playfulness. This reflects the particular tone of the book, which has been called satiric but which I see as walking the line between trauma and comedy. It’s the kind of voice that outsiders use within their own communities, where the most terrible and humiliating things become, through the power that storytelling gives you, hilarious.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
I outlined my general preferences (e.g., illustrated art, bold colors and graphics) and submitted a Google doc with examples of covers I admired. Nicole sent us a few concepts and color palettes to consider, and we were all unanimous on the central image of the crocodile. It’s beautifully drawn—so powerful and eye-catching, especially against the tomato-red background. The bird was originally perched on the crocodile, but when we asked for more humor, Nicole had the bird fall haplessly through the air, which was perfect. We went through a few rounds of getting the type treatment right, as it was important to me that the title text echo the book’s serious yet spikily humorous tone. I think the final result nails it.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
THRILLING. That was the moment my book really started to feel like a BOOK. It’s hard to describe seeing your thoughts, your words, perfectly encapsulated in a beautiful graphic image. I have so much respect for the work that Nicole and other book designers do—the way they transform an intangible collection of words into an art object is amazing.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
KEEP YOUR ENEMIES CLOSE features the recurring motif of a crocodile. On one level, it’s easy to view the crocodile on the cover as representative of a particular character—but given that the book is about larger systems of power, and finding ways to survive within these systems, it’s certainly not cut and dry. Who, exactly, is the enemy? Who is the crocodile? Same with the bird. It’s no coincidence the bird is a house sparrow, a highly invasive species. You might think you know who the hapless bird is supposed to represent, but there are multiple ways of seeing it, just like in fiction.