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Give two singles their own fashion consultants and interior designers and allow them four days to perk up each other's style and homes--and Lily Allen's dream job turns into a nightmare. Episode by episode, through disasters and matchmaking miracles, Lily starts to discover that a little bit of controlled chaos is the spice of life and love. …More

The Long Italian Goodbye is a portrait of a boy growing up in Chicago surrounded by love and the reality of loss. You will laugh and cry, and be very sad to leave the world Mr. Benedetti paints so splendidly. Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author. …More

Diane Boston lives with her Marfan syndrome-afflicted 13-year-old son in a suburb of Chicago and teaches social studies at the high school, with the students even voting her Teacher of the Year. But she has some dark secrets. Her ex-husband Greg always suspected that Diane kept things from him, but he has no idea just how right he is. When Diane's son, David, finds a box of unmarked videotapes and watches one of them out of curiosity, he discovers that it's a hardcore adult movie from the late 1970s. …More

Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions
By Czyzniejewski, Michael
2012-04 - Curbside Publishing
9780983422853 Check our catalog

Another exhilarating thriller from Edgar Award-winner Ellis, "The Hidden Man"introduces the new series protagonist, Jason Kolarich. …More

Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is a family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. …More

A BookPage Notable Title
Poignant, ambitious, and tremendously fun, this fiction discovery of the season is a novel about two generations of family and friendship in Chicago from November 1979 through January 1981. …More

The delightfully original novel that Mitch Albom called "charming, sensitive, and at times flat-out hysterical." John McNally's unconventional coming-of-age tale describes the hilarious and poignant antics of two teenage boys and the moment of transcendence that can occur in everyday lives. …More

Eleven-year-old Maggie and her Irish immigrant parents leave the city one June morning in the early 1950s and begin a new life in their home on the prairie on the outskirts of Chicago. Maggie meets three neighbors: Manny, Teo, and Dar. The four friends share a fondness for tennis, baseball, books, and horseback riding. Above all, they love to hang out in the prairie, a splendid place where they construct a hut made of straw, build fires in the evening, watch sunsets, and dream of some day going out west to Wyoming. . …More

Among the most self-assured and sharply crafted debuts in recent years, "Calumet City" detonates a hardnosed cocktail of character-driven suspense and Chicago-ghetto intrigue. …More

In Evanston one bitterly cold day, acting on impulse, Rachel buys the house in which she grew up. It's an effort to recapture the happiness and stability that have been shattered by a series of blows that began with the death of her father ten years ago and culminated with her recent divorce. She moves in, hopeful that a rekindled love affair with newsman Amos Curley and the return home of her teenage daughter, Edie, will start the healing. She and Edie are suddenly joined for the Christmas holidays by her mother, Camilla - who brings her own memories and fears to this wary reunion …More

Michael Raleigh's "In the "Castle of the Flynns" is about a young boy growing up Irish in a vibrant 1950s Chicago neighborhood. Now grown and looking back on those years, Daniel recalls his bouts with grief and fear of abandonment as he learns to adjust to his new surroundings amidst his oddball family. …More

In a neighborhood on Chicago's outskirts, Fabio and Lucia Comingo have built a new American life--and struggle to comprehend the influences that distract and change their restless young sons. Through this masterful evocation of a time and place, Tony Romano, the acclaimed author of "When the World Was Young," brings a first-generation Italian American family vividly and poignantly alive in closely related tales at once joyous, heartbreaking, and honest. …More

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In an explosive debut thriller reminiscent of the best of Dennis Lehane and Harlan Coben, a young Chicago professional learns that the more he has, the more he has to lose. …More