One of the first A&B books I worked on when I joined the company was Little Children, by Tom Perrotta, and it remains one of my favourite reads.  The trade paperback got rave reviews, the mass market paperback became a Top 10 Bestseller, the novel then hit the big screen in a film starring Kate Winslet, and now the book is deservedly getting its place on our Classics list.

There’s been a different cover for each stage of this book’s long and wonderful life. For the trade paperback we mirrored the American cover with the grassy background but changed the American cookies to jelly babies. The mass market paperback made the most of the pool, a key setting in the novel.  I still love that vibrant blue and orange colouring and remember brainstorming about featuring an adult wearing armbands (to emphasise it was a book about adults behaving like children, not a book about children). Then came the film tie-in edition sporting the image from the film poster. And now we’ve gone back to the iconic pool but with a more stylish image for our classic cover. I love the angle of the shot, which brings our focus away from the baby blue and pink  chairs perched perfectly by the side of the pool, and to the subtly ominous water. It matches the book’s theme perfectly: there’s something bubbling beneath the placid, saccharine surface of suburbia…

The new edition has given me an excuse to reread it and I urge you, if you have yet to discover this book, to pick it up now. It’s one of our Books of the Month (so £2 off this month) but it’d actually be worth pay £2 extra for it.

Chiara Priorelli, Publicty & Online Marketing Manager