Release, the latest novel by twice Carnegie Medal award winner and Class showrunner Patrick Ness will arrive in UK bookstores on 4 May, 2017.
The book centers around Adam, a teenage boy who must keep his boyfriend and his sexuality a secret from his religious family, and carries on in Ness's long history of exploring LGBT issues and other tough subjects faced by teenagers in a uniquely stylistic way.
And here's what you came for...
This UK cover of Release was illustrated by Levente Szabo and designed by Ben Norland for Walker Books.
Here's what Ness has to say about the book and its cover:
Release is – well, I was going to say it's an unusual novel for me, but they all have been, I suppose. I always want to frighten myself, challenge myself to do something new. Fear makes you pay attention! And complacency is creative death.
So the challenge this time was taking the incomparable structural model of Mrs Dalloway – could I detail an entire life in just a single day? - and strive for even a fraction of the emotional intensity she gets. It's one of the very best books in the English language, so what could be scarier?
It also is a very, very personal story for me. It's about Adam Thorn, 17, living in a very religious American home and having to keep his boyfriend a very strict secret. Yeah, I know what that's like. Plus, it's about one of those days where, though you didn't plan it, everything changes. Everything. And maybe it has to. Maybe you have to let go of some things so you can grab on to the right new things. It's a hard experience, but you're bigger at the end. You're more yourself. You're ready for what's next.
Also, there's a lost soul, shadowing his day. Are they on a collision course?
The other model for me was the glorious frankness of Judy Blume's Forever, the book that blew apart once and for all what could be written about in YA fiction. Teenagers could be real, nuanced, complicated characters with surprising internal lives and secrets that adults would be quite shocked to learn. But then we all did, didn't we?
This beautiful Walker cover [designed] by Ben Norland is the first one of my books ever to feature a figure on the front aside from the monster in A Monster Calls. But this is the one for it. It's Adam Thorn's life. It's the journey across a very long day that he's about to take. Wish him luck.