Chicago Books We Loved: 2025

by Donald G. Evans

(with Michael Antman and Susan Dennison)

Best Of lists are built on the false premise that the author has exhaustively consumed all the possibilities and judged the entire field on its merits. Nobody has read all the books (or seen all the movies, or tasted every pizza, or hiked every trail). What we get, mostly, are Best Of lists based on a small personal sampling and the opinions of others.

That’s not I’m doing here. What I am doing is highlighting some Chicago books I found incredible, from among the fraction I actually read. I wind up prioritizing books sent to me, or that I picked up at a launch, or that I agreed to review, or that a bookseller recommended. Even among those…a lot are still on the nightstand. I spent more time reading books from 1978, or 2011, or 1908, than I do new releases.

I enlisted the help Michael Antman and Susan Dennison to each add a title to the list. This is our gift to you, because we’re sure you’ll discover, as we did, the power and pleasure of these titles.

People of Means
Author: Nancy Johnson
Publication Date: February 11
Publisher: William Morrow/HarperCollins

In Nancy Johnson’s People of Means, the fight for racial equality is on, sort of. In moving backward and forward from the Rodney King protests of 1992 to the campus counter revolution in Nashville, circa 1964, the narrator shows the unbroken line of disparity in the treatment and rights of Black Americans. No Black citizen entirely sidesteps the institutional and personal animosity aimed at his or her race, but some have prospered in spite of it. Should the successful remain sidelined, lest they give up their hard-earned wealth, status, and position? Is that status in itself a way to advance equality for all?

A love story is at the core of this historical novel; make that two. Freda’s conflicted attachments to a soon-to-be doctor and a zealous activist represent polar choices. Freda’s daughter also struggles to convince herself that a relationship to a CTA bus driver (rather than somebody of her own more rarified familial and educational status) is the right choice. These romantic plotlines serve the author’s larger intent, to show the risk (literal and metaphorical) inherent in activism. This novel weaves these serious and important explorations about social justice and responsibility into a highly entertaining plot. Thematically, the characters grapple with identity and legacy, but those explorations happen organically. (DGE)

True Failure
Author: Alex Higley
Publication Date: February 25
Publisher: Coffee House Press

True Failure, set in the fictional Chicago suburb of Harks Grove, the Loop, and Lincoln Square, is a tangled web of lies, omissions, exaggerations, and fantasies among its characters. Protagonist Ben has lost his job and decides to become a contestant on Big Shots, a television show where participants try to secure funding for their business ideas. However, Ben doesn't have a business idea or a plan, only an obsession to get on the show and convince the producers to invest in him as a person.

What follows is Ben's spiral into dissecting the television show to determine how to give himself a statistical advantage to being selected for the show. Along the way, his unsuspecting (at first) wife and the show's staff, and eventually actress Mariska Hargitay of Law & Order SUV get drawn into the whirlpool of Ben's obsession. We slip in and out of each character's thoughts, until we are wrapped up in their ever-changing half-truths and fabrications. This is a novel of people on the brink of failing spectacularly and doing everything they can to come out on top while self-sabotaging their lives and careers.

While the town of Harks Grove is fictional, it could be any western suburb of neat homes whose owners commute to Chicago for their jobs. A scene between Ben and his friend Nguyen is set in a restaurant on Jewelers' Row on Wabash, a place favored by Loop workers. Ben visits the famous Gene's Sausage Shop in Lincoln Square (a place that draws tourists) and ascends to the rooftop beer garden to meet a woman from a nonprofit who wants to interview him for a job. He muses on the unusual location, and decides to treat himself to a beer, which leads to several beers. With a dwindling bank account, but still holding out hope he will be selected for Big Shots, he tells the interviewer he isn't Ben, despite the fact he is wearing the shirt and hat he told her he would wear. 

Higley is the author of two other novels, and lives southwest of Chicago. 

(Susan Dennison has written for numerous consumer and trade publications, and worked in communications and public relations for public libraries. She has an MFA from Columbia College Chicago and has sat on numerous literary boards. She currently serves on the East on Central Association in Highland Park. She is working on an essay collection based on labyrinths.)

The Blue Door
Author: Janice Deal
Publication Date: April 22
Publisher: New Door Books

Chicago-based author Janice Deal takes readers on a melancholy exurban odyssey in her new novel, The Blue Door. It’s the story of a middle-aged woman named Flo who journeys through the desert heat in search of her missing dog, named “Dog” because she lacks the psychic energy to grant him an actual name. For Flo isn’t only looking for her pet; she’s also trying to process the recent death of her best friend and, at the same time, the complicated reality that her eccentric and peripatetic daughter Teddy, who has served a prison term for the murder of her sympathetic high school teacher, is coming to visit.  

When Teddy was a child, she and Flo invented a secret language for themselves called Derrykin. One of the questions Flo asks herself as she wanders through the sun-baked streets of her unnamed town is what common language, if any, she and Teddy still share. Something, to be sure, for as Flo repeats to herself, “Mothers and children, they burn in each other.” But whether the fire will cleanse or destroy is something that Flo cannot discern in her present troubled state. 

The events leading up to Teddy’s murder of her teacher are traced in a resonant and psychologically acute short story, “Family of Two,” in Deal’s celebrated 2023 collection, Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories. Novel and short story alike are filled with lower-middle-class cultural signifiers: Plastic shoes, Salisbury steak, chow mein casserole, gravel lawns, a sweater “discolored and nubbled with pills,” a house that “smelled like cigarettes and candy and stew.”

But there’s a distinct stylistic difference between the closely observed story with a strong authorial presence and the partly stream of consciousness and present-tense novel, told entirely from Flo’s point of view with some brief and surreal folktales Flo’s mother used to tell her as a child interspersed with the spare narrative. The shift in stylistic mode from story to novel is a fascinating object lesson in authorial intent. 

Deal, a previous finalist for the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, has also published another short story collection, The Decline of Pigeons, and another novel, The Sound of Rabbits. As a close observer of the American landscape and the colorful and conflicted characters who inhabit it, Deal is a writer well worth our attention.  

(Michael Antman is the author of the novels Cherry Whip, recently republished in a 20th Anniversary edition, and Everything Solid Has a Shadow.  He recently completed a new novel, Where Would the Bad Luck Sleep?, set in a modern-day leper colony and co-authored with Irina Velitskaya.  He also is a book and theatre critic and the former Global Head of Marketing for a Fortune 100 company.)

The Perils of Girlhood
Author: Melissa Fraterrigo
Publication Date: September 1
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Back in the early 2000s, or maybe it was even the late 90s, Melissa, Christine Sneed, and myself formed a little, informal critique group. That was around the time Melissa got pregnant and then gave birth to twin girls. That, of course, began her journey of understanding girlhood from a brand-new perspective. Girlhood is a memoir-in-essays, at least it reads that way. The precise, musical prose belies a messy, chaotic story, so raw in the telling that it reads at times like a horror plot where you want to warn the on-screen characters about the danger that awaits. This danger, from Melissa’s perspective, is often uniquely female—an omnipresent male lasciviousness puts sex at the center of even the most seemingly platonic moments. It’s not only sex that presents challenges. It’s power. It’s health. It’s childbearing. It’s expectations. Writing about female issues from a female perspective is hardly new, but despite the territory being familiar Melissa makes it urgent. Her turmoil bends inward, partly influenced by societal, or conventional, pressure. Melissa’s journey begins with her own girlhood and accelerates into her twin daughters’ formative years. That the story is told through a series of relatively short essays makes the reading experience a bit like looking at a stack of Polaroid pictures, one after another after another. Pictures of eating disorders, sibling rivalries, sexual assault, violence near home, emotional detachment, bullies, depression, Stranger Danger, health crises, career challenges…... In the course of these snapshots, Melissa transforms from anxious teen to struggling young adult to frustrated career woman to striving artist to young lover to wife to…mother. Every experience and emotion in Melissa’s life leads to the monumental task of guiding her twin daughters into the future. What Melissa excels at, and what makes this reading experience so gratifying, is that the what is an entrée into the how. In the larger portrait that emerges, we see courage, respect, diligence, defiance, and the kind of love that fortifies a life in which outside forces, including luck, often go against you.

Melissa’s painfully honest (and often unflattering) assessment of her own life allows us inside an evolution born as much out of necessity as desire. Like every parent, Melissa wants to do what’s best for her children, to keep them safe, make them happy. But she also knows they must grow into women capable of managing on their own. Melissa’s exploration of her own girlhood and that of her offspring encompasses family, societal pressure, work, creativity, and generally the struggle to be, or know how to be. (DGE)

The Boy Kingdom
Author: Achy Obejas
Publication Date: September 16
Publisher: Beacon Press

Memoirs take many shapes these days, often blowing up a splinter of life into a meaningful narrative. Achy’s memoir is different than any I’ve ever read. In a series of intense prose poems, the author drops you into various moments of her life, largely without context. The book is divided into four parts, focusing on her sons, her parents, her Cuban ancestry, and her divorce. Some of the poems pick up where the last left off, but mostly Achy leads you through moments rife with opportunity. And pressure. Each bit and bob vibrates with tension and meaning, such that the overall effect is to make the reader hyper aware of how fleeting life is. It’s as though Achy wants to make every moment matter, and respect the fact that every moment that came before also matters. In these prose poems, the author navigates an acrimonious separation and the search for new love. She raises her two boys largely without their other mother, though her presence looms. She seeks new love even as she experiences being replaced. Throughout it all, there are her two boys—the center of her being. Each piece appears in both English and Spanish, and as this memoir progresses, we gain an appreciation for the ways Achy the mother teaches and reveres the multilingual, multicultural, queer family to which her sons were born. Though Achy is Jewish, the spirituality that imbues these pages seems an amalgamation of many beliefs and loves.  All of it together adds up to a fascinating glimpse of a life that is being figured out in real time. The author seems determined to embrace the good and suppress the bad as she makes the most of this short time she has, especially with her sons. (DGE)

Whirlwind: My Life Reporting the News
Author: Bill Kurtis
Publication Date: September 16
Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Bill Kurtis is a beloved figure here in Chicago, and around the country, even years after he retired as anchorman to pursue independent film projects, writing, and comedy gigs on projects like Anchorman and Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! When Bill was a nightly fixture on television news, he brought the viewing public the most important, pressing stories. The thing about TV news, though, is that a story must, just by nature of the medium, be reduced to its essence. No time for more than summary and a few details. But as a reporter, Bill invested hours and hours, days and days, weeks and weeks, to capture that essence. Here, employing a medium more suitable to depth and examination, Bill expands upon a series of historical events at which he hunkered down. He also shares stories about making stories, which turn out to be fascinating in another way. Bill’s career spanned great technological changes in capturing visual stories—he gives us perspective on how these innovations enabled (and sometimes hindered) his and the industry’s ability to uncover and cover the news. What makes this such an enjoyable and enlightening memoir is that Bill gravitates towards adventure. His broad travels provide perspective on fascinating people, places, events, and eras, and we vicariously get to globetrot our way through history with the author. Bill went to law school before devoting himself to journalism, which not only bolstered his career but makes his recounting of famous trials (Richard Speck and The Chicago Seven, among them) the most interesting in a series of interesting tales. (DGE)

The Phoebe Variations
Author: Jane Hamilton
Publication Date: September 23
Publisher: Zibby Publishing

The novel opens with the narrator, Phoebe, looking back on her adolescence, specifically a moment in April, 1974 when her mother, Greta, cajoled her to meet her birth mother, Bea Dahlgren, and her family. The story is being told at a distance of more than 40 years. She is not quite 18. Phoebe, all through her childhood and early adolescence, all the way up until a month before high school graduation, has been a straight A (no, A+) student. Her academic studies are disciplined; her spare reading exhaustive; her extracurricular activities—like director of the school’s plays, editor of the literary magazine, staff member of the yearbook, and pianist for the choir--impressive. She diligently practices her chosen instrument. In short, Phoebe subscribes to and excels at formal education, seemingly on a path to successful adulthood. But then: her calculus grade detonates her Valedictorian status, and she continues to fall, all the way out of the ranks of the more accomplished students. She discovers that her birth parents had willingly forfeited her, despite already having a child and about to have several more. Her adoptive mother announces that she will be fostering two grade school-aged brothers, effectively starting a new family. In what should be a predictable last month of high school, in which Phoebe luxuriates in accolades and waxes nostalgia, she changes course. She decides, emphatically, that she must escape her single mother’s suburban Chicago home as soon as humanely possible. She goes into a kind of free fall, and in that falling undergoes a dramatic period of self-discovery. Arguably, that month of Phoebe’s reckless behavior is more of an education than all her years until that point. Every one of Phoebe’s relationships, especially with her best friend Luna, with whom she long ago bonded over Jane Eyre, becomes the subject of intense examination. This brilliant, often quite funny, coming-of-age novel is as inspiring as it is entertaining. Surprising, too. Phoebe enters motherhood almost at the same time she enters adulthood, and she uses those lessons of her formative years to upend all their intended conventions. (DGE)

Great Disasters
Author: Grady Chambers
Publication Date: Sept. 30
Publisher: Tin House

In Grady Chambers’s debut novel, Great Disasters, Graham Katz looks backward at the evolution of a close-knit friends group whose genesis was the private Gold Coast high school where they experienced adolescence together. Graham feels his past deeply, especially as it seems to possess the clues to his present, which is not necessarily what he’d hoped. Alcohol and insensitivity, which often go hand-in-hand, fuel Graham’s regret-filled retrospective analysis of his past, as well as his search for a crisper, more meaningful future. The tangle of high school buddies, thirty-ish years on, live different lives, some thriving in their careers and families, others ambling through fragile existences at best on the perimeters of success. Graham’s first-person perspective is magnificent, though often painful. He not only recalls but dwells upon seemingly miniscule moments that, he’s coming to understand, changed trajectories, thwarted relationships, and ruined lives.

The drinking started early for Graham and crew. On the surface, binge-drinking and partying seem like innocent-enough youthful experiences, rites of passage, maybe, or at worst common-place indiscretions. Looking back, though, Graham realizes that he existed in a kind of perpetual fog, and that his decisions, even at such an early age, were of sometimes grave importance. (DGE)

(Register for our Great Chicago Books Club session on Friday, March 27, when Grady will be here to discuss his novel at length).

The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories
Author: Barry Pearce
Publication Date: November 11
Publisher: Cornerstone Press

Daniel Burnham’s famous 1909 “Plan of Chicago” imagined grandness, prosperity, and all kinds of loveliness for the burgeoning city. Wider streets. Civic enterprises. Expanded railroads and harbor facilities. He said, in essence, “Close your eyes. PICTURE this!” Barry Pearce’s The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories assesses more than imagines the city. He does this through the city’s landscape, but also its people. Pearce picks up Burnham’s dream more than a century later, stringing together nine lengthy short stories that shatter the illusion of urban bliss. He says, in essence, “Open your eyes. LOOK at this!” Pearce’s protagonists take us on a tour of a city filled with quiet desperation, an ice pond whose surface conceals ever-expanding micro cracks. These characters—many first- and second-generation immigrants—grind out their existences as census workers, contractors, undergraduates, grifters, claims adjusters, rape victim advocates, and waiters, all the while meeting jagged obstacles to any kind of upward mobility.

Maybe what impressed and interested me most about this collection was the way Pearce plotted, in a kind of tangled web, the interior and exterior stories. In most of these nine pieces, I found myself quickly settled into a narrative whose arc seemed sure, even predictable, only to find that my assumptions were wrong. These stories are smart and precise, and persistently imbue the reader with a sense of the fragile ecosystem that impacts our quality of life. They build one upon the other. Better yet, they support one another. Pearce’s Plan of Chicago, unlike Burnham’s, shows a city consciously excluding one class from another, deliberately erecting invisible barriers and confusing detours. Despite the serious, often somber, tone of this collection, Chicago still comes across as a place to love, to be, only with maddening conditions and pre-conditions that leave us with a feeling that we might need a new plan, or at the very least admit it’s time to tweak the old one. (DGE)

(See my longer review, originally published in Chicago Review of Books.)

Donald G. Evans is the author of a novel and story collection, as well as the editor of two anthologies of Chicago literature, most recently Wherever I’m At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry. He is the Founding Executive Director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.