Do we ever truly judge a book by its cover? Or do our books silently judge us? This conversation dives deep into how cover art maps our memories and exposes the intersection of art, memory and memoir. Holly Sykes is a Hong Kong author and essayist whose Substack, Beyond the Book Cover, explores a beautiful premise: that our wonky IKEA bookshelves are actually time machines. A book’s cover is a portal capable of transporting us right back to the exact moment, place, and emotional headspace we were in when we first read it. Whether it’s connecting a sweltering classic novel to a stressful family relocation, or tracing the visual anchors of our past, Holly’s work creates shelf awareness of the books that read us.
This article was originally published in The Hooghly Review. This article is being reprinted with The Review’s permission.
Sadie: You’ve beautifully written that book covers are portals capable of transporting us to the exact moment we first read a text. What was a specific spark or memory that made you realize a cover – rather than just the text itself – holds this distinct, nostalgic power?
Holly: I took Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop down from my bookshelf to remind myself of the way she weaves fairytales, myths and magic into Melanie’s story – I was hoping to do the same in my own writing – and found a note pasted inside the front cover: Presented to Holly Sykes for Hard Work in French, 1995-1996. I’d forgotten the book had been a school prize, and I was surprised to remember I’d been good enough at French to warrant it. Immediately, I was transported to my best friend’s bedroom where, lying on the carpet in patches of sunlight eating chocolate and oranges, we recited French verbs. So, it was actually the inside of the front cover rather than the cover itself that first got me thinking about how evocative of the past books can be.
How do you choose the books you feature? Do you actively browse bookshelves for visual triggers, or do memories of specific life chapters prompt you to track down an edition’s cover?
Most of the entries have been inspired by old favourites from my bookshelf, but in Hong Kong I don’t have sufficient space to keep all the books I love, so sometimes I have to approach it from a different angle. I recently wrote an entry about Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking straight after reading it for the first time because, although I had no memory attached to the cover, Didion’s way of writing about how grief commandeered her mind resonated with me. Following her husband’s death, no matter where she went or what she did, she was reminded of him. This must be a common experience for anyone mourning the loss of a loved one, and for me, memories of my dad are most reliably prompted by dogs. Whenever I see a dog I’m often reminded of the dogs he owned and loved. From there, it’s an easy leap back to all the dogs of my childhood.
Your Substack essays function as deeply personal mini-memoirs tied to literary themes. For example, in your piece on The Go-Between, you paralleled the novel’s sweltering, tense summer with your family’s stressful 2021 relocation from England to Hong Kong. Is it daunting to expose raw personal history under the guise of writing an essay about someone else’s book?
At the beginning, I was writing these mini-memoirs for myself – I had no followers or subscribers. There was a lot of freedom in that. Imagining that no one else would read what I’d written allowed me to explore ideas fully, with no constraints. It got me started and helped me build confidence to write more honestly and openly. And I hadn’t experimented with nonfiction before. I wasn’t one for diaries or journals growing up, so it was a surprise to discover how comfortable I felt writing about my memories in this way. The platform became a space for me to test my natural voice without the requirement to shape a story with it. Nevertheless, mini-stories were emerging. Sometimes there’s a close connection between the story of the novel and my memory, as with the entry on Melmoth; sometimes the cover is simply a springboard to a memory which has very little in common with the novel, as with the entry on The Rainbow. Either way, it’s enabled me to further develop my voice whilst exploring ways in which nonfiction and fiction can weave together.
When you’re feeling anxious or unmoored, do your eyes naturally drift toward covers with specific colours or textures to calm your brain down?
At home, I have blue books stacked beneath a blue and cream vase, I have orange and yellow books stacked beneath a vase of dried orange flowers. On the shelves, hardbacks sit together, the Viragos are lined up neatly. I’m not precious about it. Much. I do often switch it all around, just so I can see the books with fresh eyes again. They’re as beautiful to look at as the flowers in the vases, as the pictures on the walls. Holding a book, looking at a cover, opening it and reading a few paragraphs immediately quiets me. And I crave shared book spaces: libraries and bookshops filled with like-minded people. They’re incredible places. I often marvel at how they manage to radiate calm whilst simultaneously being so full of potential. Open a book and you’re thrown into a world that’s unfamiliar and stimulating; close it and you’re back in your haven of quiet. I love that.
Have you ever encountered a book cover that you wanted to write about, but found that your life experiences at the time didn’t mirror the narrative closely enough to fit the Substack’s theme?
When I wanted to tell the story of our 2021 relocation to Hong Kong, I realised that The Go-Between features a hot and troubled summer similar to the one we had when we made our journey. Glancing at the cover and being reminded of pitiful thirteen-year-old Leo who is charged with carrying messages between forbidden lovers recalled to mind how fraught and ominous our summer had been too. I wasn’t able to read anything during our long relocation period because I was too anxious. I first read The Go-Between when I was a teenager back in the 90s, so it couldn’t remind me of our summer relocation three decades later, but I liked the parallels. So I cheated a little on that one.
When you revisit a cover like Mrs Dalloway or The Bone Clocks for a post, do you ever find that the memory of who you were when you first read it clashes with how you view the book now?
Each time I re-read a book, a new thread emerges that I haven’t noticed before. Sometimes the thread is integral to the general understanding of the book, like the realisation that Holden Caulfield is an unreliable narrator (I didn’t know about unreliable narrators when I was a young teen reading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time: I believed Holden when he said everyone around him was boring or ‘phony’) or that Miss Jean Brodie is a cruel and tyrannical teacher to the girls in her charge, rather than cultured and nonconformist, as I thought on first reading. Generally the revelation of any new thread occurs only when I’m ready for it. For example, re-reading To The Lighthouse before writing the Substack entry, I was surprised to learn that Mrs Ramsay dies halfway through the novel. In my memory, she was indomitable, indestructible, larger than the book itself, because when I read it originally, I had been in love, puppy dog fashion, with a number of older women who loomed large in my life.
As a published short story writer currently seeking representation for your award-winning unpublished manuscript, Wooden Dolls, how does digging into these portals influence your own fiction writing? Does analysing these masterpieces make you write differently?
It keeps me aspirational and it keeps me working on my craft. Filling my Substack shelf with Sarah Perry and Jhumpa Lahiri and Rose Tremain and Shaun Tan reminds me that there are many ways of being a great writer, but I must keep practising if I want to be even half as good as any of these masters.
Each of your Substack posts lead with the famous first line of the book (except for silent narratives like Shaun Tan’s The Arrival). As an author, what’s your philosophy on the relationship between a book’s cover art and its first line? Do they have to complement each other or do opposites attract?
They can be quite different, I don’t mind. Traditionally-published authors rarely get to decide on the cover of their book, so sometimes there’s a mismatch between the tone of a novel and the way the publisher wishes to market the book (Norah Lofts – below – is a prime example of this). But when they do match, it’s extremely satisfying. After reading my piece on Sarah Perry’s Melmoth, one reader drew my attention to the ravens on the front cover. I’d failed to notice them, but now I can only admire how apt they are for that bewitching first line.
Sometimes we form the deepest emotional bonds to books with objectively hideous, cheap, or faded covers because of when we read them. How do you mentally separate the aesthetic quality of the art from the weight of the personal memory attached to it?
I find any book cover with an image from the film version tricky to bond with, yet I still treasure my copy of The English Patient (perhaps the shot of Ralph Fiennes in the desert looking back over his shoulder has something to do with it). The real magic, of course, is inside the cover. It’s in the story itself, so I can get past Juliette Binoche feeding Johnny Depp a truffle on my copy of Chocolat because the feelings and memories the novel evokes for me run much deeper than my dislike for Depp’s knowing look.
You won the Portfolio Prize during your Creative Writing MA with the University of Lancaster. Does the regular, self-imposed deadline of writing a Substack entry satisfy a similar creative discipline, or do you view it purely as a creative playground separate from your novel writing?
Unless you have an agent or publisher or editor telling you to write it’s quite a challenge to find the motivation to do so, especially when working on a longform project like a novel. There are times when I get stuck on a chapter or want to think about something other than my protagonist. Writing short Substack entries gives me a break from longer projects but it also allows me to keep practising the craft. It opens up different avenues for exploration, both in form and content. After a while of posting my twice-monthly pieces, I began to realise how much I was enjoying writing about northwest England. It’s where many of my short stories are set but over time I grew keen to set a novel in this landscape too. In the best possible way, Substack has been both a taskmaster and a creative playground.
Substack allows for immediate reader interaction. What’s been the most surprising response you’ve received from readers or shared memory in your comments section?
When I wrote about how the cover of The House of Spirits transports me to the magical house my family lived in when I was a young child (complete with an attic packed with treasures the previous owner had left behind: a pair of antique tureens in the shape of oversized geese, a tattered green-gold chaise longue), my sister left a comment that I wished I could have incorporated into the piece. The book cover features two girls, one of which seems to be sprouting feathers, and I distinctly remember the way my sister and I would fly when we were inside that house. We flew from the bookcase in the purple playroom and we flew between the single beds in our shared bedroom upstairs. Her memory of the house was more grounded but, I think, more curious and enchanting. It was of ‘discovering and playing with woodlice in the corners.’
Substack is a text-heavy medium, yet your blog is anchored in visual imagery. How do you balance the digital presentation of these covers with the prose?
As well as being the social media platform of choice for writers, it’s also a great place for visual artists to share their work. The medium gives me an opportunity to celebrate the artwork of a book cover alongside the author’s crafted story, and in Beyond the Book Cover, I have fun exploring my own response to both of these.
Memory is a notorious liar. Have you ever tracked down a beloved book from your past, 100% convinced the cover featured a specific image, only to find the actual artwork was completely different? What do you think your brain was trying to supress or express with that invented memory?
When I dug out my set of Barbara Trapido books, I was surprised at how vibrantly striped they are. The palette is all primary colours, the pictures on the front outlined in white marker. All far more tangible, solid and shouty in their portrayal of how life is. I’d remembered the collection as having blurry, pastel-hued covers. The world Trapido builds is one of arty, bohemian, quick-witted women who are entirely sure of themselves: everything I dreamed of being in my early twenties. I suppose my imagination had created suitably dreamlike covers for those dreamlike aspirations.
Is there a book cover sitting on your shelf right now that you desperately want to write about, but you keep putting it off because the chapter of your life it unlocks is still too painful or raw to excavate?
I had to build myself up to writing about Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair because it transports me to the terrible but necessary year my husband and I spent apart (we were not married at the time, and there was no future for us on the horizon that we could see). But writing about that painful time helped me understand new layers that I hadn’t considered before. Writing both fiction and nonfiction is a way for me to process the world around me and it helps me understand my part in it.
Have you ever bought a terrible, embarrassing or tacky edition of a masterpiece just because the chaos of the cover art fascinated you? Which book is your greatest visual guilty pleasure?
The beauty of a cover is often in the memory that’s attached to it which is why I absolutely adore the covers of the Sweet Valley High books (the 1980s versions). I’m not claiming they’re masterpieces, but, at ten-years-old, they had my full attention. The covers might be lurid and tacky, but those rival twins, Jessica in her cheerleader outfit, Elizabeth with her hair pinned back in a sensible and honest fashion, occupy a special place in my heart. I recently met someone who had nearly completed the set, including the original twelve that Francine Pascal wrote herself. She had them lined up in numerical order. It was a truly wonderful sight to behold.
We’ve all been on a train reading a book with a cover so bizarre, provocative, or ugly that we felt compelled to hide it from the other passengers. What’s the most socially awkward book cover you’ve ever read in public? (Please don’t say Fifty Shades of Grey!)
Ha! Norah Lofts’ historical novels are magnificent. In her Suffolk trilogy, she charts six hundred years of England’s history, from 1380 to 1956, through the inhabitants of a single house, Old Vine. Her research is meticulous, without it showing on the page, and her characters are vivid and compelling, making it easy to believe they were real people, real ancestors of the land. Lofts was (and perhaps still is) grossly underrated and her book covers reflect the misconception that her characters are all daring rakes and swooning damsels. After attempting to take one of these books out in public, I now read her mostly on my e-book, but I wish more readers knew about her and her unsentimental exploration and recreation of how people used to live.
If you accidentally leaned too hard against one of your portal covers and fell through it Mary Poppins-style, which book’s universe would be the worst one to get stuck in for a weekend?
Philip Larkin’s world of lonesome misery. I love a bit of desolation in poetry, I’m all for depressive landscapes and bleak longing, but I don’t think I could handle living that kind of life. Aside from The Whitsun Weddings, which makes me want to take a long, meandering train ride through the English countryside, Larkin conjures up a murky reality. Just reading the titles tells us that much: ‘Home is so sad’; ‘Nothing to be said’; ‘Ambulances’; ‘An Arundel Tomb’. I used to teach this collection. The students didn’t take to it much.
If an eccentric billionaire offered to fund your Substack for a decade, but the catch was you had to get one book cover tattooed across your entire back, which cover from your archive are you choosing to live with?
It would have to be Fevvers from Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus drawn by Barbara Kaiser. I haven’t written about this book cover yet but I can’t wait to delve into the memories it elicits. The artwork is so wonderful I have it in a frame on my bedroom wall, and I would quite happily have it tattooed across my back. A circus aerialiste with a pair of enormous wings sprouting from her shoulder blades, Fevvers hovers over her fellow performers: Buffo the Great, a Princess and her dancing tigers, an elephant, a strong-man and a fortune-telling pig called Sybil.
Photos by Holly Sykes
Another conversation with Holly on Mapping Loss in a Crowded City was published by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal over the weekend and can be read here https://chajournal.com/2026/09/19/holly-sykes/
Holly Sykes is a well published author of short fiction and writer of female-led novels; she won the Page Turner Award for Best Contemporary Fiction 2024 with her debut unpublished manuscript ‘Wooden Dolls’. Previously, it won the Portfolio Prize 2023 (MA, University of Lancaster). You can find her short stories and poetry in Stand Magazine, Dreamcatcher Magazine and Fairlight Books (UK) and The Apostrophe and Voice and Verse (HK).
Alongside working on her current novel and short stories, Holly also publishes Beyond the Book Cover on Substack, which is featured in the Spring 2026 issue of Mslexia. Originally from the Northern England, she has lived in Hong Kong for the past five years, where she is an active member of the Hong Kong Writers Circle and Women in Publishing Society.
Connect with Holly: @hollysykeswriter (IG) @holly.sykes.79
https://substack.com/@hollysykes1
Sadie Kaye is a writer, broadcaster and performer from Hong Kong. Her humour, fiction, rants & reviews have appeared in the South China Morning Post, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal & The Hooghly Review, where she’s also guest editor of The Writer’s Gauntlet. Her humour column series for RTHK Radio 3, Sharp Pains, received nominations for Best Comedy from the New York Festivals Radio Awards and Moment of Comedy Gold from the International Women’s Podcast Awards in 2022 & 2023. In 2024, she won the Comedy Women in Print Prize for Flash Fiction. She’s been Highly Commended and nominated by the Association for International Broadcasting for her offbeat documentaries & factual podcasts about mental health. She’s a producer for Contro Vento Films. Her most recent film, To Love A Narcissist, was released in North America 19 May 2026 and is gradually being rolled out worldwide.
Connect with Sadie: @kayesadie (IG) @sadie.kaye (FB) @sadiekaye (X)
Be the first to comment