Nothing Left to Burn by Heather Ezell follows Audrey as she navigates a summer full of dark secrets and dangerous wildfires. See the cover reveal here.
About ‘Nothing Left to Burn’
The autumn morning after 16-year-old Audrey Harper loses her virginity, she wakes to a loud, persistent knocking at her front door. Waiting for her are two firemen, there to let her know that the moment she’s been dreading has arrived: the enormous wildfire sweeping through Orange County, California is now dangerously close to her idyllic gated community of Coto de Caza, and it’s time to evacuate.
Over the course of the next 24 hours, as Audrey wrestles with the possibility of losing her family home, she also recalls her early, easy summer days with Brooks, the charming, passionate, but troubled volunteer firefighter who enchants Audrey — and who is just as enthralled by her. But as summer tumbles into fall and secrets from Brooks’s dark past come to light, Audrey can’t help but wonder if there’s danger in the pull she feels — both toward this boy, and toward the fire burning in the distance.
Exclusive cover reveal for ‘Nothing Left to Burn’ by Heather Ezell
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A note from the author:
The first time I saw the cover for Nothing Left to Burn, I gasped, pinned it to my desktop, printed it out and tacked it to my wall, and made it the background on my phone. Five months later and I still open the full-sized image on my monitor on a regular basis. All of this is to say: the incredible designer, Corina Lupp, stole my heart by capturing Audrey’s story in one single stunning image.
While Nothing Left to Burn follows the October day Audrey’s life is overrun by fire, the novel is also entwined with her summer of first love and naive passion, with the bittersweet heartache of coming to terms with false identity and old guilt gone sour — and this is so well conveyed in the pinks of the pool that burnish down from purple to shadowed blue. Additionally, I never wanted the focus of the cover to be fire, so Lupp’s approach to incorporating it here is brilliant: flames reflected in a pool, the hallmark of Orange County gated communities (the wild infiltrating suburbia is my favorite element to toy with in my fiction, particularly in Nothing Left to Burn, so how could I not be delighted?).
But my love for the cover is only heightened by the fact that Audrey, in many ways, is a girl still learning to swim — she misses the water, loves the water, and yet has evaded swimming for years — yet it’s when a wildfire is looming over her that she’s propelled to do the very things she’s feared since the summer’s end: whether that’s wading into shallow water or running to a fire. Ultimately, the image juxtaposes the past lush summer days with the tension of the present ticking clock and high stakes, and I am so indebted to Corina Lupp for designing such a gorgeous cover for my debut.
About the author
A Southern California native, Heather Ezell was evacuated for a fire at the age of three and subsequently grew up with an obsessive fear of wildfires. She has been chasing reprieve from California’s heat ever since–from the Rocky Mountains to Interior Alaska. Heather graduated from Colorado College with a degree in English literature and creative writing, and she currently lives in the Pacific Northwest where she writes, practices amateur ballet in the forest, and obsesses over the weather.