BookBrowse Reviews The Coin by Yasmin Zaher

A popular choice for book jackets in recent years, perhaps especially in the historical fiction genre, is an image of a presumed female figure pictured from the neck down or from behind, omitting the specificity of facial features, suggesting a general representation of a woman from a particular setting and time. The cover of Yasmin Zaher's contemporary novel The Coin is both in this trend and outside of it, as it displays a person in a trenchcoat and glitzy heels whose face is blocked from view not by the artist's framing but by the chaotic positioning of her body. Unlike in the typical "headless woman" images, there is no sense of romance or nostalgia — no sense of place, even. The background is a plain, bold yellow. The figure stands on her left foot with her right kicked high in the air, one hand pointing upward and the other wrapped around herself as she turns away from the ...