The Printed Page

I’m a very visual person and love beautiful, or interesting, cover art. It entices, and invites, me to stop and take a peek instead of walking right on by. This week’s Cover Attraction is:

Title: The Servant’s Quarters
Author: Lynn Freed
Release date: April ’09

From Fantastic Fiction:
THE SERVANTS’ QUARTERS, a complex and sophisticated love story, evokes a vanishing world of privilege with a Pygmalion twist.

Haunted by phantoms of the Second World War and the Holocaust, young Cressida lives in terror of George Harding, who, severely disfigured, has returned from the front to recover in his family’s stately African home. When he plucks young Cressida’s beautiful mother and her family from financial ruin, establishing them in the old servants’ quarter of his estate, Cressida is swept into a future inexorably bound to his.

In the new setting, she finds that she is, after all, indentured. She is conscripted to enliven George Harding’s nephew, the hopelessly timid Edgar, to make him “wild and daring.” And she takes on this task with resentful fury, leading the boy astray, and, in the process, learning to manipulate differences in power, class, background and ambition.

Only slowly does she come to understand that George Harding himself is watching her. And waiting.

A simple table and chair with an open book. The sunlight slanting in through the cathedral window. The soothing, muted shades of grey. All this invited me to take a seat.

P.S. Because this is really about cover art I’ve given my Cover Attraction this week a picture frame.

♦♦♦

What’s your favorite cover attraction this week? Don’t forget to leave a link to your Cover Attraction post.