Cover reveal: The God of This World

Some books are written to be read. This one was written to be hidden — and then, by an accident of grief and an estate sale, to be found.

The God of This World is a novel in the form of a discovered manuscript. For twenty-seven years the late Rev. Ambrose Mortimer, a mild archivist who spent his working life cataloguing other men's certainties, sat up at night building one of his own: a patient, verse-by-verse argument that a certain contemporary figure is written into the end of the world. He never published it. He never quite disavowed it, either.

He did not write it alone. His wife, Cassandra, a copy-editor by trade, read every page as he made it and answered him in the margins — correcting his figures, puncturing his certainties, and being right, by her own tally and in the end by his, on very nearly every page. When the two of them died eight days apart, their grandson found both manuscripts in a locked box and chose to publish hers: the marked-up one, the argument and the answers together.

Which brings us to the cover. We wanted an object that looked as though it had been kept in a box for a long time by someone who was not entirely sure they should have kept it at all: deep oxblood and worn gilt, engraved capitals, and a small scroll holding a silhouette you will recognize and then wish you hadn't. It should read less like a thriller about the apocalypse and more like a piece of private family scripture — which, in the end, is what it is.

A word on what this is and isn't. It is a novel. The argument inside it belongs to a fictional man, and the book makes no claim about anyone living. Its real subject is not prophecy at all, but a marriage carried on for thirty-one years in the footnotes of the end of the world. It is darkly funny and, we think, quietly haunting. Read it, as the grandson says in his introduction, for her.

The God of This World is out August 4, in paperback and for Kindle.