We’ve made it through the first half of the year, and things aren’t slowing down any time soon for books about Chicago and books by Chicago authors! In fact, the second half of 2025 has even more books than we listed in Part I!
This list is and always has been an eye-opening project. Chicago is a a massive, diverse city with an incredibly strong literary community, sure, but it’s still surprising to see just how many books are making out of the Windy City into the world. The goal of the Chicago preview series is always to honor our amazing writers and the work they’re producing—from deeply researched biographies and captivating literary novels to thrilling mysteries and more, there’s something for every reader emerging from our city.
June
Frank Zappa’s America
By Bradley Morgan
LSU Press
June 2, 2025
From his early albums with the Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa established a reputation as a musical genius who pushed the limits of culture throughout the 1960s and 1970s, experimenting with a blend of genres in innovative and unheard-of ways. Not only did his exploratory styles challenge the expectations of what popular music could sound like, but his prolific creative endeavors also shaped how audiences thought about the freedom of artistic expression.
InFrank Zappa’s America,Bradley Morgan casts the artist as an often-misunderstood figure who critiqued the actions of religious and political groups promoting a predominantly white, Christian vision of the United States. A controversial and provocative satirist, often criticized for the shocking subject matter of his songs, Zappa provided social commentary throughout his career that spoke truth to power about the nefarious institutions operating in the lives of everyday Americans. Beginning in the late 1970s, his music frequently addressed the rise of extremist religious influence in American politics, specifically white Christian nationalism.
Frank Zappa’s Americaexamines the musician’s messaging through song, tracing the means by which Zappa created passionate, at times troubling, art that combats conservativism in its many manifestations. For readers in the twenty-first century, his music and public advocacy demonstrate the need to preserve democracy and the voices that uphold it.
June
Chicago’s Fine Arts Building: Music, Magic, and Murder
By Keir Graff
Forward by Gillian Flynn
Trope Publishing Co.
June 3, 2025
In Chicago’s Fine Arts Building, celebrated writer and Fine Arts Building tenant Keir Graff takes readers behind the scenes of this cultural hub. Initially conceived as a space for artists’ studios, a home for the city’s working artists, the building was an immediate success, but the Great Depression brought a long, slow decline to the building. Graff explores the building’s history, its revitalization, and its cultural place in the city of Chicago. Featuring interviews with current tenants and access to the building’s archives, including historical photos and artifacts, and a foreword by bestselling author Gillian Flynn, Chicago’s Fine Arts Building sheds a new light on this storied building and its long history.
Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story
By Erica Stern
Barrelhouse Inc.
June 3, 2025
As she prepared to give birth to her first child, Erica Stern envisioned the idyllic experience promised by prenatal classes and diaper commercials. But when unexpected complications arose during labor, she found herself at the threshold of life and death, a liminal space that connected her to generations of mothers before her.
Seamlessly blending memoir, fiction, and research into the fraught history of birth—from midwives to Victorian-era sedation through the Natural Childbirth Movement and modern L&D suites—Frontier lays bare visceral truths that are too often glossed over, and offers an incisive look at the momentous and terrifying transformations of motherhood.
My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy
By Edward Hirsch
Knopf
June 3, 2025
From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet’s coming-of-age. Affectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirsch’s laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit.
Runs in the Family: An Incredible True Story of Football, Fatherhood, and Belonging
By Deland McCullough and Sarah Spain
S&S/Simon Element
June 3, 2025
A revelatory examination of the choices we make as parents and children, explored through the true story of an adopted Black man on a journey to find his biological family and discover where and to whom he truly belongs. Based on Emmy and Peabody Award–winning sports journalist Sarah Spain’s viral ESPN article, Runs in the Family is an emotional examination of the sacrifices, choices, and nurturing that shape us and our loved ones. It offers a heartfelt testament to the profound impact of family and the kind of love and mentorship that can forge enduring bonds that transcend biology.
The Nimbus
By Robert P. Baird
Henry Holt and Co.
June 10, 2025
On an otherwise ordinary fall day on a university campus in Chicago, the toddler son of an ambitious divinity school professor named Adrian Bennett mysteriously starts to glow. The nimbus, as the strange, soft light comes to be known, offers no clues to its origin and frustrates every attempt at rational explanation.
Though the nimbus appears only intermittently, and not to everyone, the otherworldly glow quickly upends the lives of all those who encounter it, including Paul Harkin, Adrian’s broke and feckless graduate student, who likes being a graduate student a little too much for his own good; Renata Bennett, Adrian’s omnicompetent wife, who can’t see her son glowing even though the nimbus is turning her life upside down; and Warren Kayita, a down-on-his-luck librarian and aging divinity school alumnus on the run from a violent criminal. As news about the nimbus spreads around the university and beyond, Adrian, Paul, Renata, and Warren are set on a collision course that will threaten their lives and put their deepest convictions to the test.
Chicago Before the Fire: An Economic History
By Louis P. Cain
University of Illinois Press
June 10, 2025
An advantageous location and entrepreneurial passion helped fuel Chicago’s transformation from a fur trading post to a thriving city. Louis P. Cain’s economic history places pre-1871 Chicago within the narrative of national expansion and examines infrastructure, finance, and other areas of city life. Business histories tell the story of fortunes made with essential products like meat and grain. Sketches of titans like William Ogden and Cyrus McCormick reveal how real estate, farm equipment, and other industries became engines of local growth. Cain also details public health improvements that made Lake Michigan safe as a water supply while census data informs a portrait of Chicago’s population and the lives of the free Blacks and Irish immigrants at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Panoramic and up to date, Chicago before the Fire looks at how an intersection of geography, vision, and investment built a great American city.
The Book of Echoes
By David Gregory Welch
Jackleg Press
Published June 16, 2025
At once deeply personal and infused with a profound respect for its literary predecessors, The Book of Echoes resonates with the speaker’s journey through Tourette’s syndrome. This exploration of motor tics, echolalia, and phantom speech gradually unfolds into a joyous and surreal celebration of Jack Spicer’s insight that “Poems should echo and re-echo against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can.” Welch’s The Book of Echoes delights in illuminating the intimate spaces of connection that poetry provides.
The Möbius Book
By Catherine Lacey
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
June 17, 2025
Adrift in the winter of 2021 after a sudden breakup and the ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey’s appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith’s absence and reemergence. Bending form, she and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and narrative itself.
A Short Introduction to Anneliese
By James Elkins
Unnamed Press
June 17, 2025
A Short Introduction to Anneliese is the second volume in author James Elkins’ multi-volume mega-novel Five Strange Languages being published by Unnamed Press, all of which trace the final year of Samuel Emmer’s life before he disappears.
July
Tricks of Fortune: A Play the Fool Mystery
By Lina Chern
Bantam
July 1, 2025
Tarot card reader extraordinaire Katie True gets embroiled in another local murder when her best friend becomes the prime suspect in this exciting mystery from the Edgar Award-winning author of Play the Fool. Katie True has gotten her crap together. . . sort of. Now that the sinister events of the past year have wound down, Katie has finally made her dream come true and opened her own tarot reading room—even if it’s in her sister’s old real estate office in an outdoor strip mall. It’s a good start, but her momentum grinds to a halt when the murder of beloved veteran police officer, Matthew Peterson, shakes her and her small community to the core.
A Small Disturbance on the Far Horizon
By Richard Babcock
Pact Press
July 15, 2025
In the stark Nevada landscape of the 1950s, A Small Disturbance on the Far Horizon explores the aftermath of a murder through the intertwined lives of three individuals. Tom Lang, a deputy sheriff, finds solace in a secret affair with Ettie Calvert, the wife of his overbearing partner, Ronnie. Their lives unravel when Adam Ott, a troubled teenager, impulsively murders Ronnie, setting off a harrowing chain of events that culminates in a deadly pursuit through the rugged mountains. Against the backdrop of the country’s nuclear bomb tests, which ominously shadow the narrative, Tom, Ettie, and Adam each wrestle with their choices and seek redemption from the haunting consequences that relentlessly pursue them.
The Girl I Was
By Jeneva Rose
MIRA
July 15, 2025
Alexis Spencer will use any inspirational quote to rationalize her failures and shortcomings. Her closest friends are a distant memory, and her college debt is still as high as the day she left. But that’s all fine and dandy, because “whatever will be, will be.” However, when Alexis loses her job and her relationship on the same day, there’s no quote strong enough to get her through that. In typical fashion, she blames the world for her problems, including her younger self, who should have tried harder. Feeling sorry for herself, Alexis finds a bottle of vodka from her college days and goes on a bender, blacking out in the process. Only this time, she doesn’t wake up at home, or in the right city. In fact, she isn’t even in the right year.
Alexis is back in her college town in the year 2002.
American Mythology
By Giano Cromley
Doubleday
July 15, 2025
Every month at St. Pete’s Tavern in rugged western Montana, a meeting is convened by the Basic Bigfoot Society’s members—both of them. Jute and Vergil are lifelong friends, bound by an affinity for the elusive North American Wood Ape. Their monthly meetings and annual expeditions are a tradition that keep their friendship alive when so much else about their small town has fallen away.
But things are about to get exciting for the Basic Bigfoot Society. Dr. Marcus Bernard, the country’s foremost Bigfoot “expert,” approaches them with a proposition that seems almost too good to be true: to join their next expedition, along with an ambitious young documentarian, Vicky Xu. Thankfully, Vergil’s daughter Rye is home from college, and decides to tag along in order to make sure her dad and Jute aren’t made fools of. Once in the woods, strange things begin to happen to them that seem to defy rational explanation. Is this a hoax? Or are they on the precipice of the greatest anthropological discovery ever?
A Resistance of Witches
By Morgan Ryan
Viking
July 15, 2025
Stubborn, plain-spoken and from an unimpressive family, Lydia Polk never expected to be accepted into the Royal Academy of Witches. Now, with Hitler’s army rampaging across Europe, the witches of Britain have joined the war effort, and Lydia is key to the cause: she must use her magic to track down magical relics before Hitler and his sycophants can. When a Nazi witch infiltrates the Academy with heart-breaking consequences, the coven is left shaken, exposed and divided. The elder British witches have no interest in further loss of coven life in service of a government that has forced them into hiding for decades, no matter the consequences to the world. But with the discovery of the Grimorium Bellum, an ancient book that leaves a trail of death and destruction wherever it goes, Lydia knows her mission has never been more urgent.
The Province of All Mankind: How Outer Space Became American Foreign Policy
By Stephen Buono
Cornell University Press
July 15, 2025
Bucking a half-century of “space race” scholarship, Stephen Buono argues that despite waging a totalizing Cold War, the United States achieved stunning diplomatic successes that heralded the cosmos as a realm of peace and cooperation. The early story of space politics is not primarily one of militarization, but rather of political prescience and restraint. The Province of All Mankind demonstrates that space became a unique domain of American foreign relations and international law, and provides lessons for the Second Cold War unfolding over the horizon.
Pan
By Michael Clune
Penguin Press
July 22, 2025
Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.
David Davis, Abraham Lincoln’s Favorite Judge
By Raymond J. McKoski
University of Illinois Press
July 22, 2025
Raymond J. McKoski offers a biography of Davis’s public life, his impact on the presidency and judiciary, and his personal, professional, and political relationships with Lincoln. Davis lent his vast network of connections, organizational and leadership abilities, and personal persuasiveness to help Lincoln’s political rise. When Davis became a judge, he honed an ability to hear each case with complete impartiality, a practice that endeared him to Lincoln but one day put him at odds with the president over important Civil War-era rulings. McKoski details these cases while providing an in-depth account of Davis’s role in Lincoln’s two unsuccessful campaigns for U.S. Senate and the fateful run for the presidency.
Angel Down
By Daniel Kraus
Atria Books
July 29, 2025
Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception, swindling fellow soldiers at every opportunity. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly mission: venture into the perilous No Man’s Land to euthanize a wounded comrade.
What they find amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell.
Savvy Summers and Sweet Potato Crimes: A Mystery
By Sandra Jackson-Opoku
Minotaur Books
July 29, 2025
When Savvy Summers first opened Essie’s soul food café, she never expected her customer-favorite sweet potato pie to become the center of a murder investigation. But when Grandy Jaspers, the 75-year-old neighborhood womanizer, drops dead at table two, she suddenly has more to worry about than just maintaining Essie’s reputation for the finest soul food in the Chicagoland area.
Even as the police deem Grandy’s death an accident, Savvy quickly finds herself—and her beloved café—in the middle of an entire city’s worth of bad press. Desperate to clear her name and keep her business afloat, Savvy and her snooping assistant manager, Penny Lopés, take it upon themselves to find who really killed Grandy.
Guess Again
By Charlie Donlea
Kensington
July 29, 2025
On the 10th anniversary of a teenage girl’s disappearance, her cold case breaks open in dangerous ways…and threatens to tear apart her small Wisconsin town all over again in the masterfully twisty new psychological suspense novel from the internationally bestselling author of Twenty Years Later.
Their End is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition
By brian bean
Illustrated by Charlie Aleck
Haymarket Books
July 29, 2025
Expanding the prevailing narratives of how modern policing came to be, Their End Is Our Beginning uses a Marxist framework to trace different practices of oppression, colonial rule, and experimentation spearheaded by ruling nations around the globe in their efforts to secure the grip of capitalism. bean draws from extensive interviews with activists from Mexico to Ireland to Egypt, whose lessons and perspectives bring nuance to the meaning of “solidarity” and clarity to what “abolition” and “revolution” look like in practice.
Featuring illustrations by Chicago-based artist Charlie Aleck, Their End Is Our Beginning is an incendiary book that offers a socialist analysis of policing and the capitalist state, a vital discussion of the contours of abolition at large, and the revolutionary logic needed for liberation.
August
Fireproof: Memoir of a Chef
By Curtis Duffy with Jeremy Wagner
Dead Sky Publishing
August 5, 2025
With rare intensity and candor, world-renowned, Michelin-starred Chef Curtis Duffy shares his epic journey from child of an outlaw biker father to famed culinary iconoclast. Fans of no holds-barred stories such as Motley Crue’s The Dirt, memoirs by celebrity chefs, and brutally honest personal memoirs will love this raw and inspiring true story.
Red Line: Chicago Horror Stories
From Beyond Press
August 12, 2025
The Second City is second to none when it comes to terror. From H.H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer, to the Jane Byrne Interchange at rush hour, there’s an ill wind blowing through the Windy City. In this new anthology, twenty stories by twenty authors from the Chicago area take you on a bloodcurdling tour of the best city in the world. Featuring new stories by Jotham Austin II, Bendi Barrett, Tina Jenkins Bell, Priya Chand, TJ Cimfel, R.L. Gehringer, Christopher Hawkins, Sandra Jackson-Opoku, Aleco Julius, Nick Medina, Jen Mierisch, Sahar Mustafah, Cynthia Pelayo, K.A. Roy, K. Saab, C.J. Subko, Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., and Lauren Emily Whalen.
The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter
By Peter Orner
Little Brown and Company
August 12, 2025
Jed Rosenthal hasn’t published a book in fourteen years, the mother of his child left him in a “trial separation” that has stretched on indefinitely, and he struggles to navigate the daily sorrows of their co-parenting arrangement. But the implosion of Jed’s family is simply a footnote in the larger history of the Rosenthal family’s decline.
Just days after the JFK assassination, Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet was found dead in her Hollywood apartment. The press reported that the 22-year-old was strangled, yet unanswered questions linger to this day. Cookie’s parents—Chicago royalty, Irv and Essee Kupcinet—had been close friends with Jed’s grandparents, but in the aftermath of her death, their friendship abruptly and inexplicably ended. Decades later, Jed pores over family stories, newspaper archives, old photos, and crime scene notes, believing that if he can divine the truth of Cookie’s death—whether it was suicide, murder, or part of a larger conspiracy—it might shed light on a mystery closer to home.
Love is an Open Book
By Chandra Blumberg
Canary Street Press
August 12, 2025
Mia Brady never imagined her romance novels would become bestsellers, much less inspire a hit TV show. However, after signing a deal to write the final book of the series, she’s struck by a serious case of writer’s block. Her fans are clamoring for a passionate payoff, but Mia’s own experience with heartbreak–and current lack of real-life romance–is getting in the way. Do friends who become lovers ever truly have a happy ending?
Gavin Lane would like to think so. As Mia’s ride-or-die BFF, he’s been by her side through it all and convinced himself his crush on her is a thing of the past. He’s not about to let his feelings ruin their friendship, and never will. But that doesn’t stop him from pitching a bold idea to help save Mia’s career: testing out tried-and-true love story tropes…together.
Upstanding Young Man
By Sharon Doering
Hyperion Avenue
August 12, 2025
In a quiet Chicago suburb, a star wrestler goes missing weeks before his high school graduation, shattering his mother’s carefully curated image of domestic bliss. A pulse-pounding thriller with complicated family dynamics, perfect for fans of domestic suspense writers like Mary Kubica and Jennifer Hillier.
Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being
By Marc Berman
S&S/Simon Element
August 12, 2025
Dr. Marc Berman, the pioneering creator of the field of environmental neuroscience, has discovered the surprising connection between mind, body, and environment, with a special emphasis on the natural environment. He has devoted his life to studying it. If you sometimes feel drained, distracted, or depressed, Dr. Berman has identified the elements of a “nature prescription” that can boost your energy, sharpen your focus, change your mood, and improve your mental and physical health. He also reveals how central attention is to all of these functions, and how interactions with nature can restore it. Nature and the Mind is both an introduction to a revolutionary new scientific field and a helpful guide to better living.
Radiophonic Feminisms: Latina Voices in the Digital Age of Broadcasting
By Esther Díaz Martín
University of Texas Press
August 12, 2025
What does Latina feminism sound like in popular culture? Drawing on case studies of commercial radio programs and podcasts hosted by Latinas and oriented toward Latinx listenership, Esther Díaz Martín explores how Latina voices create female-specific aural spaces that interrupt the misogynist status quo in US mainstream media.Radiophonic Feminisms focuses on radio/podcasting as a medium in which women find methods for resisting oppressive gendered cultural imaginaries.
Through their specific articulations–that is, the quality of their voices—their music choices, and the soundscapes they construct, Latina hosts since the early 1990s have offered feminist responses to a cultural moment marked by the demographic changes brought on by the political economy of migration and the social changes wrought by media in the digital age. Drawing attention to the invisible antisexist work of creating sound, and to its reception, Díaz Martín bridges the epistemic insights of Chicana feminist theory and sound studies, enriching and further decolonizing our thinking about auditory meaning making.
The El
By Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.
Vintage
August 12, 2025
An ordinary day in August 1979 dawns hot and humid in Chicago. Teenager Teddy is living with his dad after being kicked out of his mom’s house due to his gang activity. But Teddy has thrived in the Simon City Royals, and today, he’ll be helping to lead a posse of the group’s younger members south across the city to Roosevelt High School to attend a gathering of gangs forming “the Nation”—a bold new attempt at joining forces across racial lines. This holds particular importance for Teddy, as his branch’s only Indigenous member.
But when the meeting breaks up in gunshots and police sirens, Teddy must guide the Royals back across hostile territory, along secret routes and back alleys, and stop by stop on the thundering tracks of the El. In the face of violence from rival gangs and a secret Judas in the Royals’ ranks, Teddy is armed only with a potent combination of book smarts and street smarts, and by the guiding spirit of Coyote, who has granted him the power to glimpse a future only he may survive to see. Immersed in the sights, sounds, and smells of the author’s beloved city, The El will transport you to that singular sun- and blood-soaked day in Chicago. It is a love letter to another time, to a city, and to a group of friends trying to find their place and make their way in a world that doesn’t want them.
Leverage
By Amran Gowani
Atria Books
August 19, 2025
For readers of Percival Everett and viewers of Industry, a hotshot hedge fund employee must risk everything to save his job—and his life—in this timely and darkly funny thriller about race, power, and the corrupting influence of the almighty dollar. Ali “Al” Jafar is a rising star at notorious hedge fund Prism Capital, but fortunes change fast on Wall Street. When his biggest investment goes up in smoke, Al loses $300 million—and his fragile sense of self-worth—in a single afternoon. He’s certain he’ll be fired, but Prism’s obscenely rich and politically connected founder isn’t that merciful. Instead, he gives Al an impossible ultimatum: recover the lost money in three months or become the fall guy for the government’s insider-trading investigation into the firm.
The Book of Lost Hours
By Hayley Gelfuso
Atria Books
August 26, 2025
For fans of The Ministry of Time and The Midnight Library, a sweeping, unforgettable novel following two remarkable women moving between postwar and Cold War-era America and the mysterious time space, a library filled with books containing the memories of those who bore witness to history.
Games for Children
By Keith S. Wilson
Milkweed Editions
August 26, 2026
Radiant with a tenderness that is only achieved through close attention, these poems offer witnessing and formalistic exploration as well as a unique cosmology that is made ever more expansive by blurred lines between the instructional and the improvisational. For Keith Wilson, no image, thought, stanza, or diagram is sufficient in the practice of illumination, so he combines them. The Uncanny Valley diagram is repurposed to imagine a future Emmett Till never saw; visual instructions for line dancing stand in tension with the memory of Wilson’s grandfather picking cotton; prayer is input as equation; a poem gerrymanders a sentence diagram. In these and other gestures, Wilson expands the possibility of what poetry can hold.
Thematically expansive and materially ambidextrous, Games for Children demonstrates how play is one of the highest forms of freedom, and in reclaiming it, our most tender truths are exposed.
Resting Bitch Face
By Taylor Byas
Soft Skull
August 26, 2025
The author of the Chicago Review of Books Award-winning national bestseller I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times returns with a poetry collection that transforms the Black female speaker from object, artistic muse, and victim to subject, critic, and master of her story. Resting Bitch Face is a book for women, for Black women, for lovers of art and film criticism, and for writers interested in work that finds a middle ground between poetry and prose. Taylor Byas uses some of our most common ways of “watching” throughout history (painting, films, sculpture, and photographs) to explore how these mediums shape Black female subjectivity.
September
Amity
By Nathan Harris
Little, Brown and Company
September 2, 2025
New Orleans, 1866. The Civil War might be over, but formerly enslaved Coleman and June have yet to find the freedom they’ve been promised. Two years ago, the siblings were separated when their old master, Mr. Harper, took June away to Mexico, where he hoped to escape the new reality of the postbellum South. Coleman stayed behind in Louisiana to serve the Harper family, clinging to the hope that one day June would return.
When an unexpected letter from Mr. Harper arrives, summoning Coleman to Mexico, Coleman thinks that finally his prayers have been answered. What Coleman cannot know is the tangled truth of June’s tribulations under Mr. Harper out on the frontier. And when disaster strikes Coleman’s journey, he is forced on the run with Mr. Harper’s daughter, Florence. Together, they venture into the Mexican desert to find June, all the while evading two crooked brothers who’ll stop at nothing to capture Coleman and Florence and collect the money they’re owed. As Coleman and June separately navigate a perilous, parched landscape, the siblings learn quickly that freedom isn’t always given–sometimes, it must be taken by force.
White Flight: The Companion to the Old Neighborhood
By Bill Hillmann
Tortoise Books
September 2, 2025
Chicago’s western suburbs. Young Joe Walsh is making a go of it at a new school, still haunted by his rough-and-tumble city upbringing. He’s got some great opportunities–a summer seminar at one of the world’s top physics laboratories, a hard-hitting Catholic clergyman and boxing instructor who thinks he’s got talent in the ring, and a beautiful girlfriend who’s giving him some much-needed love and support. But the challenges of Chicago have followed him to its outskirts; his sister’s struggling to recover after being shot by one of his former friends, his mom’s unvarnished ways are rubbing their wealthy neighbors the wrong way, and his brother’s fresh out of prison and falling into old habits. Like many young men before him, Joe’s taking out his frustrations in the boxing ring, and dreaming of a triumphant career—but will that, too, become a prison?
The Righteous
By Ronald H. Balson
St. Martin’s Press
September 9, 2025
In this dramatic new novel, The Righteous, Theresa Weissbach, a professor at the University of Michigan, hasn’t heard from her parents in Budapest for over a year. Her best friend, Julia Powers, recently awarded a Distinguished Service Medal for her OSS service in occupied Holland, joins with her to locate and rescue Theresa’s family. While there, they become involved in a much larger cause, trying to save as many people as they can. Theresa’s father, a leader of the Budapest Jewish community, accompanies them in a desperate effort to rescue their people. Working alongside the newly formed US War Refugee Board, diplomats from neutral nations, and leaders of underground rescue organizations, Julia and Theresa forge relationships with Swiss Vice Consul Carl Lutz and Swedish businessman, Raoul Wallenberg. Their skills and connections in the complex networks of public and secret diplomacy enable Julia, Theresa, and others to take enormous risks in an effort to save thousands of innocent lives.
Authentic, suspenseful, and deeply moving, The Righteous continues Ronald H. Balson’s fictional exploration of World War II and the heroic actions of those who resisted Hitler’s Master Plan.
Kaplan’s Plot
By Jason Diamond
Flatiron Books
September 16, 2025
Elijah Mendes was hoping for a more triumphant return to Chicago. His mother, Eve, is dying of cancer, his business flamed out, and he has nowhere else to go. So he returns to Chicago feeling listless and shattered, worried about how he’s going to help his mother despite their chilly relationship. He finds some inspiration when he discovers that their family owns a Jewish cemetery and that a man he’s never heard of, his great-uncle Solomon Kaplan, is buried in a plot there. With a new sense of purpose—and an excuse to talk more deeply with his mother—Elijah begins pursuing a family mystery of extraordinary proportions.
Elijah discovers his grandfather Yitz, Eve’s father, was a powerful gangster in the 1920s. She was ashamed and never spoke about him to Elijah. As secrets unravel, the past and present become intertwined, and Yitz’s story forces Elijah and Eve to bond in ways they never have before and begin to accept each other, not as who they wish they were but as they both are.
To Clutch a Razor
By Veronica Roth
Tor Books
September 16, 2025
A funeral. A heist. A desperate mission. When Dymitr is called back to the old country for the Empty Night, a funeral rite intended to keep evil at bay, it’s the perfect opportunity for him to get his hands on his family’s most guarded relic—a book of curses that could satisfy the debt he owes legendary witch Baba Jaga. But first he’ll have to survive a night with his dangerous, monster-hunting kin.
The Whistler
By Nick Medina
Berkley
September 16, 2025
Henry Hotard was on the verge of fame, gaining a following and traction with his eerie ghost-hunting videos. Then his dreams came to a screeching halt. Now, he’s learning to navigate a new life in a wheelchair, back on the reservation where he grew up, relying on his grandparents’ care while he recovers.
And he’s being haunted.
His girlfriend, Jade, insists he just needs time to adjust to his new reality as a quadriplegic, that it’s his traumatized mind playing tricks on him, but Henry knows better. As the specter haunting him creeps closer each night, Henry battles to find a way to endure, to rid himself of the horror stalking him. Worried that this dread might plague him forever, he realizes the only way to exile his phantom is by confronting his troubled past and going back to the events that led to his injury.
Champagne and Sour Grapes
By Gary Buslik
Running Wild Press
September 22, 2025
Marriage: bliss or blitz? Champagne and Sour Grapes is a collection of short stories sharing the lows and highs, sorrows and joys, sobs and guffaws of holy and holey matrimony. Sometimes poignant, often hilarious, Buslik’s tales hit close to home, spouse-wise. We’re sure to recognize something of our giddy selves or screaming-bloody-murder neighbors in these face-smooching and head-biting gems. So pour yourself a flute of Dom P. or paper cup of dimestore boxed wine, relax in your leather lounger or rickety chaise lounge in front of your fireplace or ice-fishing hole, and have a bubbly and briny time knowing you’re not alone.
Great Disasters
By Grady Chambers
Tin House Books
September 30, 2025
In the early 2000s in Chicago, six young men start high school. Though they’ve been friends since boyhood, their high school years set them on new paths: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begin, along with the protests against them; Ryan falls in love but struggles to hold onto it; and he and the others learn to lose themselves in alcohol. With each passing year—as they enter college or the military, then the world beyond; form new relationships with partners and children; and navigate shifting loyalties to a changing country—the narrator feels the group breaking further apart and finds himself asking: What does it mean to move forward, both with and without one another?
October
You Will Never See Me
By Jake Hinkson
Crooked Lane Books
October 14, 2025
No one knows that Alice Hardy is alone and walking the dark streets of Chicago after leaving her lover’s apartment. So when a man drags her into an alley at knifepoint, she knows nobody will come to her rescue. Forced into a fight for survival, Alice leaves the man desperately wounded by his own knife and flees with her life.
When Alice tells her lover and they rush back to the alley, the ground is bare. There is no wounded attacker. There is no body. There is no blood. There is no knife. There is nothing to report to the police. But unbeknownst to Alice, one other person knows what happened in the alley: Owen Pall, a private detective slumming it with unsavory divorce work. Hired to tail a possibly straying husband, Owen followed the man to the alley and witnessed the thwarted assault—and saved the man’s life.
No Stars in Jefferson Park
By Maggie Andersen
Northwestern University Press
October 15, 2025
In her early twenties, Maggie Andersen was a founding ensemble member of Chicago’s storied Gift Theatre with her then-boyfriend, Michael Patrick Thornton. But after a series of spinal strokes left Thornton paralyzed, Andersen made the heart-wrenching decision to leave him, along with their growing company and, later, her beloved city. No Stars in Jefferson Park alternates between two narratives: the energy and excitement of making art in Chicago’s thriving storefront theater scene and the devastating day-to-day realities of rehabilitation and rebuilding—and somewhere in the middle finding the courage to choose yourself.
Over the past twenty-plus years, the Gift—now performing in the working-class neighborhood of Portage Park—has become one of the most vital storefront theaters in Chicago, with Thornton’s career taking him to Hollywood and Broadway. But Andersen’s story has brought her back home. No Stars in Jefferson Park is a testament to lifelong friendship, a love letter to Chicago, and a profound coming-of-age story about the pain and necessity of putting yourself first.
A Play About a Curse
By Caroline Macon Fleischer
CLASH Books
October 21, 2025
From the author of the viral phenomenon The Roommate comes a literary horror novel following a young playwright who conjures up a true tragedy through a Machiavellian curse when spurned by her mentor. Part psychological horror and part theatrical fever dream, Curse shadows a heroine-turned-villain as she confronts the supernatural power struggle between mentor and protégé, learning that to achieve our dreams, someone else must suffer a nightmare.
Capturing Kahanamoku: How a Surfing Legend and a Scientific Obsession Redefined Race and Culture
By Michael Rossi
HarperOne
October 21, 2025
The fascinating untold story of one scientist’s pursuit of a legendary surfer in his quest to define human nature, written with the compelling drama and narrative insight of Why Fish Don’t Exist and The Lost City of Z. In Capturing Kahanamoku, historian Michael Rossi draws on archival research and firsthand interviews to weave together a truly fascinating cultural history that is an absorbing account of obsession, a cautionary tale about the subjectivity of science, a warning of the pernicious and lasting impact of eugenics, a meditation on humanity, and the story of a man whose personhood shunned classification.
Don Bachardy: An Artist’s Life
By Michael Schreiber
Citadel
October 28, 2025
A figure as fascinating as any of his celebrated subjects, Don Bachardy has lived an extraordinary life at the heart of Hollywood, literary, and artistic circles. His drawings and paintings reside in museums throughout Europe and the United States, and include portraits of movie stars, writers, artists, and public and private figures of every background—from Bette Davis and Joan Crawford to Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote—all rendered in a candid, expressive style unmistakably the artist’s own.
In this unique oral biography, Bachardy recounts his astonishing story, providing illuminating recollections of celebrity portrait sittings and revelations about his 30-year relationship with Christopher Isherwood. From their meeting in the 1950s until Isherwood’s death in 1986, theirs was a legendary love story, courageous and uncompromising for its time, and remarkable in any era for the creative collaborations and art it continues to inspire.
November
How to End Family Policing: From Outrage to Action
By Erin Miles Cloud, Erica R. Meiners, Shannon Perez-Darby, and C. Hope Tolliver
Haymarket Books
November 4, 2025
Based on decades of shared organizing, study, and lived experience, the contributors to How to End Family Policing argue that the child welfare system cannot build genuine safety. Rather than the misleading language of “child welfare” and “child protective services,” scholars and activists use the term “family policing” to name the fact that these institutions and practices are neither neutral nor benign. Offering first-person testimony, alternatives to family policing, and definitions of key concepts, this book is an urgent call to build flourishing communities.
The Bottomless Cup: A Memoir of Secrets, Restaurants, and Forgiveness
By Kevin Boehm
Abrams Press
November 4, 2025
James Beard Award-winning restaurateur Kevin Boehm has opened 40 restaurants in his 30-year career. He’s worked with hard-core line cooks and celebrity chefs, suffered embarrassing setbacks, and won Michelin stars. Today his Boka Group is one of the most successful restaurant companies in the world.
But Boehm’s path was a complicated one. A turbulent family life and a shocking revelation about his father drove him out into the world in search of a home. He found one in restaurants. Amidst other gifted and damaged people, he discovered the magic of hospitality and the thrill of a dining room on the edge of chaos.
Patchwork: A Poet’s Guide to Love
By Catharine Hancock
Central Avenue Publishing
November 4, 2025
Fall in love, break, and heal all over again in this stunning new poetry collection from Catarine Hancock, one of today’s most beloved voices in modern poetry. In this deeply emotional journey, Hancock captures the shifting tides of love—from the thrill of new beginnings and the ache of heartbreak to the quiet strength that comes from finding yourself again. Written with both vulnerability and wisdom, each poem explores love in all its forms: the euphoria of romance, the lessons learned from unhealthy relationships, and the gentle path toward a healthier, more hopeful love. Through raw, relatable verses, Hancock shines a light on what it means to truly heal and to grow, offering solace and encouragement to anyone who has ever felt lost in love.
The New Year’s Party
By Jenna Satterhwaite
MIRA
November 4, 2025
It used to be an annual thing–the raucous New Year’s party full of games and hors d’oeuvres. But for Olivia and her friends, the chaos of their thirties has really challenged the definition of annual. It’s been a few years since the close friends were last…close. But this year is gonna be different. The burnout, parenting stress, credit card debt, job drama, marriage troubles, addiction–they’re going to set it all aside for the night. No, really. They swear.
Oh, except for the secrets. Every last person has one… But secrets are only as good as the people you trust to keep them, and when the wrong one slips out…well, friends or not, that just might become motive for murder. Everybody thinks they know their closest friends–until somebody winds up dead.
The Place Where They Buried Your Heart
By Christina Henry
Berkley
November 4, 2025
On an otherwise ordinary street in Chicago, there is a house. An abandoned house where, once upon a time, terrible things happened. The children who live on this block are told by their parents to stay away from that house. But of course, children don’t listen. Children think it’s fun to be scared, to dare each other to go inside.
The disappearance of her little brother broke Jessie Campanelli’s family apart in ways that would never be repaired. Jessie grew up, had a child of her own, kept living on the same street where the house that ate her brother sat, crouched and waiting. And darkness seemed to spread out from that house, a darkness that was alive—alive and hungry.
Death and Dinuguan
By Mia P. Manansala
Berkley
November 25, 2025
Things are looking up for the Brew-ha Cafe, and Lila Macapagal can’t think of anything that could break the spell, especially with Valentine’s Day coming up—she can’t wait to celebrate with her boyfriend, Jae Park. Adding to the lovey-dovey atmosphere is Hana Lee, Shady Palms’s newest resident. She’s also Jae’s beloved cousin and chocolatier at Choco Noir, the latest addition to the town’s culinary offerings. Everything is coming into place for Hana, who left her old life in Minnesota behind to work at Choco Noir, owned by her best friend.
Unfortunately, beneath the sweet surface of Shady Palms runs a bitter undercurrent, as a series of attacks against women-owned businesses in the area escalates from petty theft to assault and murder when Hana is found knocked unconscious inside Choco Noir, and the chocolate shop owner is put out of business—for good.
December
Her Time Traveling Duke
By Bryn Donovan
Berkley
December 9, 2025
Rose Novak, a free-spirited museum employee who dabbles in magic, has had her share of disappointments. So when she tries a little spell for a romance with an “old-fashioned gentleman,” she doesn’t really expect it to work…especially literally. And yet, the duke from a painting she admired at the museum is now standing in her apartment, demanding to know who abducted him.
A man of science and truth, Henry Leighton-Lyons, the Duke of Beresford, has searched tirelessly for a way to turn back time and be with his late wife again. Instead, just as he’s about to pose for his portrait, he’s ripped centuries forward by a feckless, scantily dressed—and utterly bewitching—woman who believes in nonsense like crystals and astrology. Unable to immediately reverse her spell, Rose vows to help Henry return to his own century, even though disguises and high jinks are required to get their hands on an enchanted astrolabe and master the art of time travel. But it’s hard not to fall for the irritable yet honorable duke.
A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature
By Adam Morgan
Atria/One Signal Publishers
December 9, 2025
The definitive biography of overlooked queer icon Margaret C. Anderson, whose fight to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses led to her arrest and trial for obscenity. Perfect for fans of The Editor and The Book-Makers. Author, journalist, and literary critic Adam Morgan brings Anderson and her journal to life anew in A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, capturing a moment of cultural acceleration and backlash all too familiar today while shining light on an unsung heroine of American arts and letters. Bringing a fresh eye to a woman and a movement misunderstood in their time, this biography highlights a feminist counterculture that audaciously pushed for more during a time of extreme social conservatism and changed the face of American literature and culture forever.
