Chicago celebrity, Charles James can't shake the nightmare that wakes him each night. He sees himself walking down a long, broken highway the sides of which are lit in flames. Where is he going? Why is he walking? What is the wailing he hears around him? By day, he wonders why he's so haunted and unhappy when he has all he ever wanted-fame, fans and fortune and the lavish lifestyle it affords him. Coming from a childhood of poverty and pain, this...

When Jennifer, a grieving widow and columist for the Chicago Tribune, hears that her grandmother Samantha has fallen and is in a coma, she races to Sam's town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin where she grew up and two letters change her life; she discovers she still has the capability to fall in love.

Augie March is a Jewish-American boy growing up fatherless and poor in Depression-era Chicago. He seeks a "special destiny," although his circumstances seem to position him for a uniquely disappointing life: his family consists of a simple-minded mother, a brother and "grandmother" who prove to be Machiavellian in their intentions, and an "idiot" youngest brother, Georgie.

"In 1890s Chicago, socialite Anna Nicholson can't seem to focus on her upcoming marriage. When she learns new information about her past, she hires Pinkerton detectives. But when unflattering stories threaten her reputation and engagement, she discovers that God's purpose for her life isn't as simple as she had hoped"--

When Danny, now known as Doc, left the cornfields of Iowa, he had never dreamed of such a place as the Levee, "the shadowy, lawless region between the two worlds, where elf and human gangsters skirmish with sorcery and submachine guns and where anything can be sold, smuggled, or stolen," or of such a being as Mr. Patrise who gives him a job, a home, and a new identity.--Jacket.

A witty tale of love in what the novel's protagonist describes is the late phase of his maturity. He is Harry Trellman, an expatriate businessman who returns to Chicago dreaming of his high school sweetheart, the only woman he ever loved but who married another. Fate is kind, the woman is available and Trellman begins recovering his lost youth.

"A novel about an aspiring screenplay writer--full of script ideas but unable to follow through on any of them--who becomes entangled with a Bosnian woman and her violently jealous husband"--

"Before they were torn down in 2007, the Stateway Gardens public housing projects on Chicago's South Side were known as a hot-bed of poverty, drugs, gangs, and crime. But for some, like Tracy, the shy, intelligent young boy at the center of this enthralling collection of linked stories, they are simply home. Set in the mid-1980s and taking readers up to the point of the destruction of the infamous Cabrini Green housing projects -- similar to the Stateway...

"During her much-needed vacation, journalist Cassie Crow has a one-night stand with Scottish prankster Logan Reid, but the growing relationship that ensues is threatened by Cassie's return to Chicago to focus on her career."--Publisher.