Thursday 22 May 2008

Nathan Burton does Pat Barker

Nathan Burton's appealing cover for Pat Barker's most recent WWI novel, Life Class, is shown here.

It's not a bad book, either, though not her best. The occasional anachronism would pull me up: the word 'robot' is used during the First World War by one of the characters, for example, even though Karel Čapek did not coin it with that meaning until his play Rossumovi univerzální roboti was published in 1920.

Getting back to the subject of covers, though, Penguin has decided to republish Barker's earlier WWI trilogy with new covers by Nathan Burton. For extra grooviness, the three covers fit together to form one image. (Click for a much bigger version.)



Nice stuff. My only criticism, and it's that of a design pedant, is that it would be nice if Pat Barker's name wasn't distressed identically on all four covers. For example:

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