Anna’s Book by Ruth Rendell: Cover art by David Loew
Posted on | August 15, 2008 | No Comments
Anna's Book by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbra Vine
Anna’s Book by Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, published by New American Library in 1994.
The art director was George Cornell, I believe he’s retired, his place has been taken by Richard Hasselberger. One of the great things about George was that he gave me projects to work on in styles that weren’t represented in my portfolio.
Anna’s Book is a perfect example of this. My original layout was a photorealistic montage of images from the book. George looked at this and decided we needed to go in a new direction. In my former life as a fine artist my medium of choice was oils. At the time I had gotten the assignment I hadn’t worked on an oil painting in 10 years.
The background was created using photos of old London as reference and the foreground figure of the woman with baby carriage was shot with a model in a studio in New York. A lot of attention was paid to the detail of the costume so that it was historically accurate.
The painting was finished fairly quickly in about a week, and I haven’t done another oil painting since. I worked on several other books by Ruth Rendell including “king Solomon’s Carpet” and “No Night is Too Long” which was done a couple years later, in the style of “Anna’s Book, but all done using Photoshop and Painter.
From Publishers Weekly
From the pen of Edgar-winner Ruth Rendell’s suspense-writing doppleganger Vine ( A Dark-Adapted Eye ) comes a sixth adroitly fashioned novel of insidious psychological dimensions. Anna, an uncompromising Danish wife stranded by her husband in 1905 London, slyly scribbles tales of her hateful neighbors, boorish servant and absentee spouse while awaiting the birth of a baby. Half a century later, prompted by a poison pen letter, Anna tells her favorite daughter Swanny a half-riddle about her true parentage, but refuses to reveal the whole story, which is entangled with the murder of two women and the disappearance of a toddler. After frantically searching Anna’s many diaries for clues to no avail, Swanny publishes them to great acclaim; after Swanny dies, her niece Ann picks up the thread binding three generations and families and follows it to a neatly executed conclusion. Vine skillfully braids the lives of the three women, but it is Anna’s voice–puckish, angry, mysterious–that commands attention as fat red herrings are dangled, then tossed. While not as taut and chilling as Vine’s–or Rendell’s–best books, a mordant eye and textured accounts of turn-of-the-century London lend this novel a sharp edge.
Tags: Barbara Vine > Book covers by David Loew > Cover art by David Loew > Penguin Group > Ruth Rendell
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