The Shoe · a cover motif reimagined as an object to examine up close.
THE ORIGINAL BOOKS ↓The Shoe · a cover motif reimagined as an object to examine up close.
On the cover of What the Lake Keeps, the motif is identified as “The Red Shoe.” There are four children in the camp photograph. Each of them remembers a fifth.
On the cover of The Only Sister, the motif is identified as “The White Shoe.” One morning, one of the twins wakes with an entire life as an only child.
On the cover of The Child of Turin, the motif is identified as “The Shoes.” He is four, remembers being a dead seamstress, and her family wants him back.
The motif, its illustration, and its appearances can be compared. A resemblance proves neither that the same object has traveled nor that two stories share a continuity.
Cycles, Series & AnthologyThere are four of them in the photograph. They all remember a fifth. Sorting through old summer-camp slides, Maud Lenoir rediscovers the summer of 1996: the windbreakers, the games, the lake. And an absence that makes no sense. She is not the only one who remembers this child. Other adults carry the same missing piece, with details they thought belonged only to them.
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Intimacy, Family & RomanceThey are twins. Ji-won wakes with an entire life without her sister. Han Ji-won has known Han Ji-eun forever. Their similarities, their differences, the habits of a shared childhood seemed too old to be fragile. But another past emerges, complete: one in which she grew up an only child.
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Archives, history & recorded memoryPietro is four. Another family claims to recognize a dead woman in him. In Turin, a child remembers a seamstress’s life, gestures and details he should not know. For his mother, Rosa, the strangeness is difficult enough to take in. It becomes a threat when the dead woman’s loved ones seek to reclaim her through Pietro.
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