The Liar’s Key – early US/UK cover preview

Mark Lawrence’s The Broken Empire trilogy won awards not only for its poetic prose and boundary-pushing story, but also for its exceptional cover art. Mark has always offered up his cover designer, Jason Chan, a lot of praise and, being the good guy that he is, helped promote the artist wherever he can – there seems to be a genuine level of admiration and appreciation there; which is great to see.

Whilst the UK’s Harper Voyager decided to stick with the man who took home a Ravenheart Award at 2013’s Gemmell Awards for Mark’s latest series, Prince of Fools, Ace Books hired a new artist, Chris McGrath, to bring Mark’s latest novel to life. Although the cover was pretty good, the vast majority of fans felt something was missing from it (others weren’t sure how David Beckham ended up so far in a post-apocalyptic future). The UK’s cover kept that dark and mysterious feel that Jason does so well, whereas the American cover looked a bit Game of Thrones-y, a bit romance-y, it just didn’t quite fit.

Americans who were left disappointed will be pleased to hear that Jason Chan is back and will from now on – we believe – be doing both the US and UK covers. Of course, because two different cover styles need to be tied together, “Jason has had to balance between the tastes of two different publishers/markets and make some interesting compromises” Mark explains.

In The Liar’s Key cover design below we see that Jalan looks a lot darker and more sinister than he does on the Price of Fools American cover. That said, he doesn’t look evil or powerful in the sense that Jorg did on The Broken Empire covers either. The first thing I thought when I looked at his face was that he looks a bit like a goblin and, on reflection, that isn’t too far from his character type. He holds back from the main action, is a bit of a trickster, can be cunning, is rude and unpleasant, has a smallish frame when compared to those around him.

All the above said, I don’t think Jason has quite nailed the cover in terms of its portrayal of Jalan in the same way he did Jorg on The Prince of Thorns covers. However, I’m not really sure that he intended to. Jalan isn’t your typical hero, he is… ‘a fool’ in many respects. Harper and Ace’s desire to have a dark looking human holding a sword and killing something is understandable. When the casual fantasy reader goes looking for an Epic Fantasy novel it is the dark, the mysterious, the weapons, the monsters and so on that is sure to attract them. If they’d put a picture of a pompous looking Jalan sneaking away from the action (as Mark Lawrence reports he suggested) it may have got some laughs from those of us already familiar with his work, but those not may have ended up aligning his work to authors such as Terry Pratchett, etc.

Regardless, I love the cover and think it will look excellent on the shelves next to my other Mark Lawrence novels. The only question I have now is will the Americans re-release the Prince of Fools cover or stick with the current version? I guess they don’t have to switch, this new one ties them together nicely enough, but I’m sure there will be those whose OCD would favour a complete set of Jason Chan types.

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