No one really know how much a cover influences a reader’s decision to give a book a go. On Reddit, there are polls that show over 80% of readers will pick up a book based on the cover alone. Getting it right requires a lot of work and “feel” because there’s no recipe for success. In the end, I turned over a cover I wasn’t in love with to a well-known designer in the “bookosphere” and let him come up with variations. You can see where we began below … and where we landed up.

So what’s in a cover? Little secrets. For example, part of the novel is how the Allies’ secret services (including the CIA) would become key players in Italy’s post-war politics (Operation Gladio was just one of these clandestine projects).

As for the title image: this is a family photo. Taken on the day the tall kid in the military uniform (notice his suitcase on the right of the image) left for the Ukraine on a summer day in 1942, on his way to secure the oilfields near Baku for Duce and his mate, the Fuhrer. They’d never get there though, because the entire Italian “Alpini” army was needed elsewhere … on the Eastern Front, to secure the flanks of the German VIth Army stalled at the gates of Stalingrad.

This was the last photo taken of that boy. He never came home. Not him nor 100,000 other kids who were swept away into the ice and winter of the Ukraine in January 1943 when the Russian Red Army would cut the guts out of the German war machine in a month. They never even found his dogtags, much less his body.

So what’s in a cover?

History, a moment in time, and a story that had to be told.