Cover Reveal: Love, Like Apples by Jeff Zentner

We already know this one is going to hurt.

A kid grows up in a house without much warmth. His brother is the one soft place. The one person who shows him that kindness isn’t weakness. And then the war takes him. And instead of turning hard, he turns toward something fragile. Puppetry. Making something gentle with his hands. Believing art might matter.

That’s the part we can’t stop thinking about. Choosing tenderness anyway.

From a Tennessee orchard to 1970s New York and a scrappy public television show built on hope, with love that keeps echoing long after the moment passes. November 3rd – We can’t wait for you. But for now, we have a cover to share (and it might be our fav Jeff cover yet!).

Love, Like Apples

by Jeff Zentner
on November 3, 2026
Bookshop
Goodreads

Growing up motherless and under the cruel eye of his alcoholic, emotionally distant father, Tiller Loomis seemed destined for a hardscrabble life. In the 1960s, the small Appalachian town of Sawyer, Tennessee offered few opportunities outside of working arduous hours on his family’s apple orchard. The one ray of light was his older brother Smith, a compassionate and gentle boy who salvages what might have otherwise been a brutal childhood. Kindness, he teaches Tiller, is a choice.
But when Smith is drafted into the Vietnam War, Tiller’s world collapses. Directionless and grief-stricken, he stumbles into a children’s puppet show at his church and ultimately finds purpose and joy through the strange, tender art of puppetry. Chasing his dream of puppeteering full time, Tiller lands in the gritty, graffitied, bohemian hothouse of 1977 New York City, where experimental artists and misfit idealists are using puppets to try to reach teens with a message of hope on a PBS show called Imagine Nation.
In Imagine Nation’s cast, Tiller finds a chosen family of dreamers and creators who will change his life forever, chief among whom is the beautiful Julie DiFrancesca, a fiercely vivacious woman who offers Tiller a chance at a life he never thought possible.
Narratively framed as a present-day documentary production about Imagine Nation, LOVE, LIKE APPLES takes us from the 1970s into the modern era, tracing how the ripples from one controversial but forgotten TV show and a complicated love affair continue outward over decades, while also exploring the indelible power of radical empathy and the lives of the artists who carry its flame in their hearts.