A tale of two covers

As you must all be sick of hearing, We’ll Always Have Paris is out this month in the UK.  For reasons I don’t quite understand, it’s not out in North America until April, so I haven’t had any author copies of that edition yet.  However, I stumbled upon the cover on Amazon the other day, and very pleased I am with it too.  My usual reaction to a cover is a ‘hhhmmmnnn’ at best, but I like this one. 

The Paris background is just the bluey-grey colour I always associate with Paris, and the heroine looks pretty much like I imagined Clara. Simon Valentine is a buttoned-up economist, so the suit and tie work well for him. And they’re absorbed in each other, unlike the couple on the front of the RIVA edition, where she looks downright sulky, I think, and he looks as if he should really be at school. 

The Simon on the front of the NA edition does at least look as if he might have a degree in economics.  He reminds me of Ben Affleck in Armageddon (Remember that film?  I’m a big fan of disaster movies, as we all seem to call them now, and Armageddon was one of my faves. Now that was plotting and pace.)  Here’s a picture of Ben in the film: am I right or am I right? 

The background is also disquietingly similar to the famous shot in the film when Paris is wiped out by an asteroid – when they didn’t always have Paris, in fact.  Now every time I look at the cover, I want to shout, ‘Hurry up and kiss!  There’s an asteroid heading your way!’

I suppose the NA edition is a little more old-fashioned, while the RIVA cover (right) is sharper and more contemporary, as befits the story (or so I think). 

I’ve always had a shameful tendency to judge a book by its cover, so covers are really important to me when it comes to whether I’ll pick up a book or not and I suspect they also influence how I read it too.  What about you?