Exclusive Cover Reveal of “If Only” by Vigdis Hjorth

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the novel If Only by Vigdis Hjorth, which will be published by Verso Books on September 3, 2024. Preorder the book here.

“A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.”

So opens Vigids Hjorth’s ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.

Here is the cover, art by Anja Niemi.

Editor Cian McCourt: “We used the Norwegian neo-romantic painter Harald Sohlberg for the cover for Will and Testament, which did a grand job representing the gravitas of that novel (and the painting helpfully featured a cabin). But with the next Hjorth novel we published, Long Live the Post Horn!, I wanted something that captured the very contemporary, very relatable angst in her fiction, as well as hinting at the humour in her writing, which often goes unremarked on. I’d loved Anja Niemi’s work for a long while, and when the penny dropped that she was Norwegian (and a fan of Vigdis, as it turns out), she was the clear choice.  And I’m delighted we can return to her for If Only. This new cover gets right at the heart of how a love affair, when played out in its most ardent, obsessive key, can unmoor you from your sense of self. I think it speaks to the awful ambivalence true passion begets.”

Author Vigdis Hjorth: “I like it immediately. I like it intensely. I like that it’s so red. I like that it is not naturalistic, that it is artificial. I like that the woman’s face is realistic in its expression, the horror at the sight of what may be her own future self.”

The design team: “We were thrilled to be able to feature the stunning work of Norwegian artist Anja Niemi on the cover. Like Hjorth’s brilliant novel, Niemi’s ‘The Socialite’ implores the viewer to investigate her relationship—not to her self—but to her selves.”