Nick Cave's second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro has been out for a while now. A lot of discussion about the book has revolved around the covers used in the various editions around the world. So I've included the three major English language editions below in the order of their publication. It's an interesting exercise in pitching to the respective markets, though I seriously doubt US readers will have any idea of what the book is about from their cover.
 | Australian edition - Text Publishing - 3 August 2009 |
 | US edition - Faber and Faber - 1 September 2009 |
 | UK edition - Cannongate Books - 3 September 2009 |
The author is interviewed by Claire Suddath in "Time" magazine.
Did you really write the book's first chapter on your iPhone?If I were a citizen of Warracknabeal, where Cave was born and grew up, I'd be very, very afraid.
I actually did. I was amazed it had this little keyboard in it. I'm a techno-moron and it had this keyboard that spellchecked as you wrote. It was a good way to start writing the novel because I wasn't taking it seriously, I was just checking out my phone. The rest I wrote by hand.There's a soundtrack that goes with the book. Why did you decide to make that?
I wanted to change the way the novel was presented. We looked at all the different formats we could do and the audio book was extremely exciting to me. I read the novel onto something like seven CDs and we scored it and put music to the whole thing. If you listen to it on headphones it's extraordinary, like a hallucination or something. It's psychedelic. It's an audio book like nothing you've ever heard. There's also a Bunny Munro app for the iPhone but I haven't worked out how to download it yet.
You can read more about the book at its dedicated website and read an extract from the novel here.
