Penguin Random House Design Award

This year's Penguin book cover competition is for Jeanette Winterson's "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit".
For initial research,  I looked at the page which contained previous winners of the same competition - there's quite a range of different kind of book covers - some are highly illustrative, some use simple graphic shapes and others are text-centric.
This means that I have freedom to interpret the story and execute the illustration in any way I see fit (this will most likely be illustrative)

Initial drawings:

My thumbnails mainly focus on orange fruit, as its symbolism in the book is quite strong - it represents "normality", which the protagonist tries to fight against with her relationship. It also shows up when she feels uncertain about something.

The brown pebble represents a way for the protagonist to fight back, and so I have included it in several thumbs as well.

I then went on to develop a few of the drawings and thumbnails, and decided this cover had a lot of potential:

With the protagonist drowning in oranges to represent how she feels constrained by societal norms, but she still has a crucifix which represents the religious themes throughout.