• HOME by Harlan Coben

    Patrick and Rhys, two young boys from wealthy families went missing ten years before the night that Win, a relative of Rhys who prides himself on keeping his emotions under control but has no trouble with violence when provoked, spots Patrick in near the tracks at Kings Crossing, a seedy area where prostitution and drugs…

  • Nathan Hill: Author of The Nix

    600 pages and eight years ago, Nathan Hill started writing a short story. “I guess I gave myself permission to keep going,” says Hill, about The Nix (Knopf 2016; $27.95), his recently published—to rave reviews—novel that covers a lengthy time period and numerous geographic locations as he tells the story of Sam Andresen-Anderson, a disgruntled…

  • YA SENSATION SABAA TAHIR TO VISIT CHICAGO ON SEPTEMBER 14th

    A Torch Against the Night, Sabaa Tahir’s second Young Adult novel continues the saga of Elias and Laia as they journey north through the treacherous Martian Empire in their quest to save Laia’s brother from prison. Trying to elude the Empire’s Commandant Helen, their once great friend who is now following orders from the Emperor…

  • American Heiress By Jeffrey Toobin

    On February 4, 1974, Patricia Hearst was engaged and living with a man who had previously been her high school teacher. Though the times reflected social change and a rethinking of traditional gender roles, for Hearst, an heiress to the Hearst fortune and Steven Weed life was humdrum and she felt stifled, emotionally unfulfilled and…

  • The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore

    Obsessive himself, Graham Moore, who won an Oscar for his screenplay The Imitation Game, immersed himself in 19th century Manhattan to write The Last Days of Night (Random House 2016; $28), his historic tale about the lawsuit between two other obsessive and driven people–Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse–over who invented the lightbulb. Though it may…

  • Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago

      Almost 12,000 people streamed into the First Cavalry Armory on Michigan Avenue in Chicago on May 25, 1889 to view the coffin of Dr. P.H. Cronin, an Irish physician and political activist who had been savagely murdered. “It was one of the first ‘sensational’ murders covered by the Chicago press and far beyond,” says…

  • A New Jane Austen Mystery by Stephanie Barron

    As a Jane Austen fan, I was happy to interview Stephanie Barron, author of 13 Jane Austen mysteries including her most recent Jane and the Waterloo Map and Jane Austen and the 12 Days of Christmas, who was in Chicago last Saturday for a book event. “Jane and the Waterloo Map is set in November, 1815,…

  • The Devil Wears Prada Author Lauren Weisberger Writes Novel About Women’s Championship Tennis

    In her latest novel, The Singles Game (Simon & Schuster 2016; $26.00), Lauren Weisberger, the author of The Devil Loves Prada, tells the story of another heartless boss as we follow the attempts of Charlotte “Charlie” Silver to regain her tennis star status. Ten minutes away from playing her first match on the Centre Court…

  • My Journey from Shame to Strength: A Memoir by Liz Pryor

    Bundled into a car during a winter storm, 17-year-old Liz Pryor left her home in Winnetka with her mother to what she thought was a Catholic home for pregnant teenagers. Instead, Pryor found herself in a locked government-run facility filled with impoverished delinquent girls whose experiences and backgrounds were totally different than hers. Over the…

  • Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the US Film Industry

    When California was still all about oranges, Chicago ruled when it came to movies—a brief but glorious decade where local girl Gloria Swanson earned money as an extra to pay for pickles (of all things) before moving on to stardom, becoming Joe Kennedy’s mistress and then later the fading actress in the classic Sunset Boulevard.…