IYANWA's Prequel FAHLI front cover reveal

Okay. I've been sitting on this for weeks and I'm so ready to share it.

This is the front cover for FAHLI — the prequel to IYANWA.

I got some time to myself out in Joshua Tree over winter, and honestly I didn't go out there with a plan. I just knew I needed space to think. There's something about being out in the desert — the stillness, the scale of it, the way the light changes every hour — that makes your brain work differently. I'd been carrying ideas around for the FAHLI cover for a while but nothing had stuck, and I think I needed to get out of my own way before anything useful could happen.

So I started sketching. Thirty thumbnail ideas, give or take. Most of them were rubbish, and I mean genuinely, embarrassingly rubbish. But that was kind of the point — when you sketch fast and small you stop being precious about it. You get the bad ideas out quickly and move on. A few of those rough little drawings ended up shaping what you're looking at now, which still surprises me. Sometimes the scrappiest, most throwaway sketch has something in it that the cleaner, more considered ones don't. I've learned to pay attention to that.

Because FAHLI is a prequel to IYANWA, keeping it visually consistent was really important to me. I wanted someone who had read IYANWA to pick up FAHLI and feel immediately at home — same world, same energy, same heartbeat — while also feeling like this was its own thing. That's a tricky balance. Too similar and it feels lazy. Too different and you've lost the thread. I spent a lot of time thinking about what IYANWA's cover said and what FAHLI's needed to say differently. IYANWA is night. FAHLI is day. That sounds simple but it shaped almost every decision — the warmth of the palette, the way the light sits behind the characters, the feeling of openness versus the feeling of mystery.

The lettering mattered a lot too. I won't pretend I cracked it perfectly on either cover — I'm not sure I did — but what I wanted from both titles was something that felt organic and alive. Both titles glow, which for me reflects something beating at the heart of each story. Something within them. I wanted the letters to feel like they belonged to the world rather than sitting on top of it, if that makes sense.

Have a close look at the background of the FAHLI cover. There are a few details hiding in there that aren't accidental. I'm not saying what they mean yet — that would spoil things — but they're there for a reason, and I think once you've read the book and you come back to the cover, they'll land differently. I love that about book covers. The best ones reveal themselves slowly. You think you've seen everything and then you read the story and suddenly the cover is a completely different image. That's what I was reaching for with FAHLI, and with IYANWA before it. Whether I got there is for you to decide.

A well read IYANWA

Covers are strange things to make. They have about a second to do their job — you're standing in front of a shelf full of books, all of them beautifully made, all of them competing for the same moment of attention, and something has to make you reach out and pick one up. One second. Maybe less. That's a weird, almost impossible thing to design for, and the longer I spent on it the more I understood why it's so hard. Too much detail and the cover gets noisy — your eye doesn't know where to go and so it moves on. Too little and there's nothing to hold onto, nothing to spark that first flicker of curiosity. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle and it's different for every book, which is the thing nobody tells you.

I showed early versions to friends and family and got some great ideas for small tweaks, and general feedback, which I listened. It was awesome as it was the kind of observations that only come from people who haven't been staring at the same image for three weeks. When you're that deep inside something you stop being able to see it clearly. You see what you intended rather than what's actually there. Fresh eyes are uncomfortable sometimes. A friend pointed something out about the composition that I'd completely stopped noticing, and once I saw it I couldn't unsee it. I re-did Izzy's face several times on Iyanwa — and then the main character from Fahli — also several times. I'm glad I asked. The version you're looking at now is better because of that conversation.

Hardcover case of IYANWA

There's also a hardcover version that I'll be sharing soon, and I'm really excited about that one. The hardcover case for IYANWA was something I approached very differently to the jacket — simpler, quieter, more classic. I tried to do the same with FAHLI and I think it works, but I'll let you be the judge of that when I share it.

For now — here's FAHLI. I hope it makes you curious. I hope it makes you want to know what's inside. And I really hope that when you do read it, you come back and look at the cover one more time.

More soon.