Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of The Emilys by Heather Abel, which will be published on June 16th, 2026 by Penguin Random House. You can pre-order your copy here!
Eve is at a breaking point. Alone with her two children in Massachusetts while her husband pursues his music career in New York City, she’s frustrated, bored, and above all, lonely when she runs into Demeter, a childhood friend with whom she shared one transformative summer. Demeter is as beautiful and charismatic as Eve remembers, but she’s also distraught. Demeter’s daughter, like a growing number of others, young and old, cannot go outside during the day. No one knows why, and doctors are skeptical that these people—soon dubbed Emilys, after a famously reclusive local poet—are telling the truth. But Eve believes her friend, whose company revives her and gives her purpose. She will help Demeter—if she can just figure out how.
Eve’s search for answers brings her into the fold of an unlikely band of detectives—the local librarian and the town’s most prolific writer of letters to the editor, who both loved the same woman and now hate each other; an actor hoping to make amends for past mistakes; a hermit botanist whose seed collection might hold a clue if she’d only open her door. They meet in playdates and potlucks, the Elks Lodge and the food co-op, the botanical garden and the riverbank, venturing deep into the town’s past and finding their way towards a future wilder and more wondrous than they had ever expected. But for Eve, this future will require a price: She is keeping secrets from her husband, fighting with Demeter, distracted from her children. What is she willing to risk to find a cure?
The Emilys is a capacious, profound book about how love of all kinds—love between friends, between mothers and kids, between strangers and neighbors, love for the earth—opens up new possibilities. It asks: How will we learn to live in an altered world? How will we keep each other safe? And when the darkness comes, how will we find joy?
Here is the cover, designed by Elena Giavaldi:
Heather Abel: The first time my daughter rolled down a hill was in the tall grass behind a farmer’s market. She was nervous, so I laid down and showed her how, which she found hilarious. She reached the bottom exhilarated, grass clinging to her red curls. I watched her tiny legs trudge back up the hill—it seemed like a mountain—and as she rolled again, my joy leaped up to match hers. It had been a long day. All those days were long. But I suddenly felt so beautifully alive, part of the green grass, the autumn sky, her laughter. Just then, another mother walked up to me, shaking her head. “Careful,” she warned, motioning toward my girl. “Ticks. People are getting sick.”
This is it, I thought: Motherhood. The triumphant joy, the inescapable danger.
I started writing The Emilys with that moment in mind. In my novel, a mysterious illness unsettles a small New England town. It sounds scary, but it’s not dystopian. The book follows the people in the town—especially two moms—as they come together to figure out what’s happening. What interests me about our treacherous world is how we carry each other to safety. How we laugh ourselves through trouble. Because it’s not enough to warn each other, we have to join each other.
Contradiction became the pulse of the novel. How to love the natural world, even as we humans have changed nature in really terrifying ways? Where do you find happiness if you’re unable to go into the sunshine? I leaned on these lines from Rilke: “Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength.”
I wanted a cover that showed nature as a place of real solace, and also of potential danger. When I saw Elena’s cover, I gasped. It’s the cover of my dreams. I love the little girl hidden by the mysterious pink dot. Here childhood seems both innocent and imperiled. The girl’s white dress reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s, the poet who floats in the background of The Emilys. And I love all the green, the tangled grass, the low leaves. Sure, it makes me nervous. But I also just want to dive into that green and see what I find there.
Elena Giavaldi: For this cover, I knew from the very beginning that the main color had to be green. It’s a color that shows up constantly in the book, and nature is such an important element throughout the story. Even though the novel touches on intense themes, there’s still an underlying sense of optimism, and the cover needed to reflect both. The design had to feel lush, green, and inviting, but also a bit off—slightly eerie, with an edgy quality. The artwork aims to capture that balance, while the pink elements lift the mood and make you wonder what they are and why they’re there. The title is so strong that I felt it needed a bold typeface to really make it stand out. It’s been a pleasure diving into this novel and finding the right cover direction!
