Yoojin Grace Wuertz’s Welcome Home, Stranger is a YA novel about family, identity, and the complicated bond between two second cousins raised worlds apart. Yeji grew up in North Korea, while Ellie grew up in North Jersey, and when the two live together in Leonia for a year, they must navigate the histories, expectations, and cultural differences shaping their shared family.
Wuertz is the author of Everything Belongs to Us. Welcome Home, Stranger will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers on May 25, 2027.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Welcome Home, Stranger, illustrated by Mozza with art direction by Aurora Parlagreco. Below, Wuertz discusses the cover’s layered depiction of Yeji and Ellie, its play with scale and cultural artifacts, and how the final design captures both the friction and intimacy at the heart of the novel.
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