2025 is officially here, and so is my favorite, unruly, incomprehensibly long rundown of the books coming out this year from Chicago authors!
When I started making this series three years ago, it was because I worried that the Chicago Review of Books was missing the full breadth of writing that was coming out of this city. Our reach and focus at the review are international, but our heart will forever be with Chicago.
So, I embarked on this project, which often involves hours of research and triple checking until my eyes begin to cross. But the result has been beautiful! Chicago is and always has been a cultural and literary epicenter, but too often we can’t see the community at play behind each individual release. This series is an attempt to not only put readers onto these incredible books, but also to highlight the city’s status in the literary world. And, perhaps, start to identify a trend in the quality of the work coming out of Chicago… a renaissance, if you will.
Check back in June for Part II of this list!
January
All the Water in the World
By Eiren Caffall
St. Martin’s Press
January 7, 2025
All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents, and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they’ve saved.
The Favorites
By Layne Fargo
Random House
January 14, 2025
She might not have a famous name, funding, or her family’s support, but Katarina Shaw has always known that she was destined to become an Olympic skater. When she meets Heath Rocha, a lonely kid stuck in the foster care system, their instant connection makes them a formidable duo on the ice. Clinging to skating—and each other—to escape their turbulent lives, Kat and Heath go from childhood sweethearts to champion ice dancers, captivating the world with their scorching chemistry, rebellious style, and roller-coaster relationship.
Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies
By Michael Albertus
Basic Books
January 14, 2025
For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power, political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment.
Psychedelic Psalms: Reflections from an Offline World
By Joshua Dean Rogers
Hat & Beard Press
January 14, 2025
Psychedelic Psalms: Reflections from an Offline World by Josh Rogers is a thought-provoking collection of poems, aphorisms, essays, quotes, and illustrations written over the first 23 years of the 21st century. Written in very short snippets for the attention spans of today’s readers, the book is a contemporary stew of poetry, essays and aphorisms, seeking to explain our shared current experience and to give us guidance on how we should proceed.
Weasels in a Box
By John “Jughead” Pierson
Rare Bird Books
January 21, 2025
Weasels In A Box (a not so musical journey through partially truthful situations with eighty percent fictitious dialogue) is a meta-fictional novel that dances dangerously close to the edge of historical pop punk reality. It embodies the confusion felt by a specific pop-punk semi-famous rockstar of the mid 90’s from the band Screeching Weasel who questions the importance of his era and ultimately the importance of himself. How does this affect his life today? What fictions was he constantly creating because of his subjectivity and inability to remember accurate conversations and situations? What is Fame and how does it differ from Success?
Let’s Call Her Barbie
By Renée Rosen
Berkley
January 21, 2025
She was only eleven-and-a-half inches tall, but she would change the world. Barbie is born in this bold new novel by USA Today bestselling author Renée Rosen. In 1956, the only dolls on the market for little girls let them pretend to be mothers. Ruth’s vision for a doll shaped like a grown woman and outfitted in an enviable wardrobe will let them dream they can be anything. As Ruth assembles her team of creative rebels—head engineer Jack Ryan, who hides his deepest secrets behind his genius, and designers Charlotte Johnson and Stevie Klein, whose hopes and dreams rest on the success of Barbie’s fashion—she knows they’re working against a ticking clock to get this wild idea off the ground.
February
A Season of Light
By Julie Iromuanya
Algonquin Books
February 4, 2025
For fans of Behold the Dreamers, comes a compelling novel about a tightly bound Nigerian family living in Florida and the wounds that get passed down from generation to generation, from the author of the acclaimed Mr. and Mrs. Doctor. When 276 schoolgirls are abducted from their school in Nigeria, Fidelis Ewerike, a Florida-based barrister, poet, and former POW of the Nigerian Civil War, begins to go mad, consumed by memories of his younger sister Ugochi, who went missing during that conflict. Consumed by survivor’s guilt and fearful that the same fate awaits Amara, his sixteen-year-old daughter who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ugochi, Fidelis locks her in her bedroom, offering no words of explanation, only lovingly—if poorly—made meals and sweets.
Afro Sheen: How I Revolutionized an Industry with the Golden Rule, from Soul Train to Wall Street
By George E. Johnson
Little Brown and Company
February 4, 2025
You might already be familiar with Afro Sheen and Ultra Sheen, but have you heard of the man behind the company that produced these products? In Afro Sheen, George Ellis Johnson, the acclaimed self-made businessman, reveals his inspiring and captivating rise from humble beginnings to the top of the haircare industry.
Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
By Eve L. Ewing
One World
February 11, 2025
Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel. By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.
People of Means
By Nancy Johnson
William Morrow
February 11, 2025
In the fall of 1959, Freda Gilroy arrives on the campus of Fisk University full of hope, carrying a suitcase and the voice of her father telling her she’s part of a family legacy of greatness. Soon, the ugliness of the Jim Crow South intrudes, and she’s thrust into a movement for social change. Freda is reluctant to get involved, torn between a soon-to-be doctor her parents approve of and an audacious young man willing to risk it all in the name of justice. Freda finds herself caught between two worlds, and two loves, and must decide how much she’s willing to sacrifice for the advancement of her people.
In 1992 Chicago, Freda’s daughter Tulip is an ambitious PR professional on track for an exciting career, if workplace politics and racial microaggressions don’t get in her way. But with the ruling in the Rodney King trial weighing heavily on her, Tulip feels called to action. When she makes an irreversible professional misstep as she seeks to uplift her community, she must decide, just like her mother had three decades prior, what she’s willing to risk in the name of justice and equality.
The Perfect Stranger
By Brian Pinkerton
Flame Tree Publishing
February 11, 2025
Everyone loves Alison, the new remote employee at a major energy company. She’s a rising star in the virtual workspace, displaying incredible intelligence and efficiency with digital technology. But Linda, her manager, has growing suspicions that Alison is not the person she claims to be. As Linda probes Alison’s background, Alison fights back through cyber-attacks, ravaging Linda’s work, her family and her safety. Linda must uncover the truth to save herself and discovers Alison’s past history is a lie—in fact, she has none. Is it possible Alison isn’t human at all?
The Umbrella Maker’s Son: A Novel of WWII
By Tod Lending
Harper Paperbacks
February 11, 2025
For fans of Heather Morris and Lisa Barr, a powerful and unforgettable novel of survival against all odds and the remarkable power of love, in which a Jewish teenager in World War II Poland fights to save his life and find the young woman who holds his heart. A love story and a story of family, The Umbrella Maker’s Son is a riveting, heartfelt, and beautiful tale of survival and unexpected hope in the face of terror and violence. A chronicle of triumph, it joins the ranks of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and other memorable works of modern Holocaust literature.
American Populist: Huey Long of Louisiana
By Thomas E. Patterson
LSU Press
February 14, 2025
Thomas E. Patterson’s monumental biography of Huey Long is a profound reevaluation of his life and legacy, recognizing him as an inspirational progressive thinker, populist hero, and radical influence on the New Deal before an assassin’s bullet ended his life in 1935. Using previously untapped personal papers of Long and his son Russell, other primary sources, recent scholarship, and his experience as a lawyer, Patterson provides a necessary corrective as he analyzes the contours of Long’s career, deconstructs the elements of his success, undercuts several myths related to his time in office, and explains the circumstances that led to his ultimate downfall. The result is the most comprehensive, balanced, and analytical study of the Kingfish to date.
True Failure
By Alex Higley
Coffee House Press
February 25, 2025
Ben just lost his job, but he won’t fess up to his wife Tara. Instead, while he claims to be going to work, he’s actually devoting his time to auditioning for the wildly popular reality TV show Big Shot, where he’ll be able to pitch his unique entrepreneurial idea. Meanwhile, Tara is lying to the parents of the children at her day care, turning in fabricated accounts of the kids’ daily activities. And Marcy, the producer of Big Shot, has told her coworkers she’s taking some time to “unplug,” the better to avoid explaining her real reasons for getting away from the office…
Texas: An American History
By Benjamin Heber Johnson
Yale University Press
February 25, 2025
When Americans turn on their laptops, play video games, go to church, vote, eat TexMex, shop for groceries, listen to music, grill steaks, or watch football, they are, knowingly or not, paying tribute to Texas. Tracing the profound and surprising story of the Lone Star State, Benjamin Heber Johnson shines new light on why Texas has had such a powerful influence on U.S. history.
Fagin the Thief
By Allison Epstein
Doubleday
February 25, 2025
A thrilling reimagining of the world of Charles Dickens, as seen through the eyes of the infamous Jacob Fagin, London’s most gifted pickpocket, liar, and rogue. Long before Oliver Twist stumbled onto the scene, Jacob Fagin was scratching out a life for himself in the dark alleys of nineteenth-century London. Born in the Jewish enclave of Stepney shortly after his father was executed as a thief, Jacob’s whole world is his open-minded mother, Leah. But Jacob’s prospects are forever altered when a light-fingered pickpocket takes Jacob under his wing and teaches him a trade that pays far better than the neighborhood boys could possibly dream.
March
Deep Dish
By Marc Malnati
Agate Midway
March 4, 2025
After a tumultuous beginning, the Malnati family turned a small business headed for bankruptcy into the pizzerias that became Chicagoland’s most iconic brand. Marc Malnati reveals the inside story of a chaotic family dynamic and the healing and ultimate success that could only come because of a loyal team with an unrivaled work ethic, a willingness to embrace personal growth, and a faith that wouldn’t die.
The Game Changer
By Embassie Susberry
Avon
March 4, 2025
New York, 1950. Ambitious journalist Hettie Carlin is desperate for a scoop that will make her career. When she’s tasked with investigating the rise of Althea Gibson – the tennis world’s newest star – there are just two problems: Hettie knows nothing about tennis. Plus, her and Althea have history – and it’s not pretty. When Althea becomes an unexpected civil rights icon, the pair hold the potential to change history. If they can work together, they may just help revolutionize more than just sport once and for all…
Two Truths and a Lie
By Cory O’Brien
Pantheon
March 4, 2025
From the beloved internet humorist, a debut novel that introduces an unforgettable investigator to the drowned streets of L.A. in a hugely imaginative and heartfelt blend of noir and cyberpunk. In a mostly underwater near-future Los Angeles, aging combat-drone veteran Orr Vue now lives a simple and small life, trading snippets of what’s become the most valuable currency: information. So when the cops show up at his door looking for data on a murder he’s not even aware has happened, things get interesting for the first time in 25 years.
Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age
By Ada Palmer
University of Chicago Press
March 10, 2025
From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman empire (even its education practices) to save them from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similar nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its golden reputation suggests.
Vanishing Daughters: A Thriller
By Cynthia Pelayo
Thomas & Mercer
March 11, 2025
It started the night journalist Briar Thorne’s mother died in their rambling old mansion on Chicago’s South Side. The nightmares of a woman in white pleading to come home, music switched on in locked rooms, and the panicked fear of being swallowed by the dark… Bri has almost convinced herself that these stirrings of dread are simply manifestations of grief and not the beyond-world of ghostly impossibilities her mother believed in. And more tangible terrors still lurk outside the decaying Victorian greystone.
A serial killer has claimed the lives of fifty-one women in the Chicago area. When Bri starts researching the murders, she meets a stranger who tells her there’s more to her sleepless nights than bad dreams—they hold the key to putting ghosts to rest and stopping a killer. But the killer has caught on and is closing in, and if Bri doesn’t answer the call of the dead soon, she’ll be walking among them.
How Black History Can Save Your Life: From the Talk to George Floyd, Everything You Need to Know to Deescalate a Racist Situation
By Ernest Crim III
Mango
March 11, 2025
How Black History Can Save Your Life by Ernest Crim III, a hate crime survivor and Anti-Racist Educator, is an essential guide for anyone seeking to combat interpersonal racism, understand the roots of discrimination, and gain actionable strategies through Black historical narratives. This black history book for adults book empowers individuals, parents, and educators with tools to challenge racism and foster equity in their communities.
Malinalli
By Veronica Chapa
Atria/Primero Sueno Press
March 11, 2025
A real-life historical figure, the woman known as Malinalli, Malintzin, La Malinche, Doña Marina, and Malinalxochitl was the Nahua interpreter who helped Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés communicate with the native people of Mexico. When indigenous leaders observed her marching into their cities, they believed she was a goddess—blessed with the divine power to interpret the Spaniards’ intentions for their land. Later, historians and pop culture would deem her a traitor—the “Indian” girl who helped sell Mexico’s future to an invader. In this riveting, fantastical retelling, Malinalli is all of those things and more, but at heart, she’s a young girl, kidnapped into slavery by age twelve, and fighting to survive the devastation wrought by both the Spanish and Moctezuma’s greed and cruelty. Blessed with magical powers, and supported by a close-knit circle of priestesses, Mali vows to help defend her people’s legacy. In vivid, compelling prose, debut author Veronica Chapa spins an epic tale of magic, sisterhood, survival, and Mexican resilience. This is the first novel to reimagine and reinterpret Malinalli’s story with the empathy, humanity, and awe she’s always deserved.
And They Had a Great Fall
By Shelby Saville
She Writes Press
March 11, 2025
For fans of Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You, a debut contemporary romance about a celebrity and a single mother who push and pull against each other as they teeter between carrying on a secret affair and living an authentic life. And They Had a Great Fall is the story of two people who are going through the motions in life—until they finally look inside themselves to figure out what it takes to find a happily ever after.
I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education
By Karen G.J. Lewis & Elizabeth Todd-Breland
Haymarket Books
March 25, 2025
In 2012, Karen Lewis led the Chicago Teachers Union to a historic strike, challenging the city’s powerful mayor and paving the way for an unprecedented wave of teacher strikes in the decade that followed. I Didn’t Come Here to Lie, written in collaboration with historian and education expert Elizabeth Todd-Breland, tells Lewis’s story in full for the first time, capturing her lively wit, her charisma, and her commitment to building the schools and communities teachers, students, and families deserve.
April
All I Want
By Darcey Bell
Pocket Books
April 1, 2025
When Emma’s husband, Ben, falls in love with a large Victorian mansion for sale in rural upstate New York, he swears to her the fixer-upper will be worth the risk. With a baby on the way, Emma would like to live in a charming, safe community, and in a space larger than a one-bedroom New York City apartment. On impulse, she agrees to Ben’s plan, and they put in an offer on the house. Sure, the mansion has a somewhat creepy backstory and is a bit dilapidated, but Emma and Ben are in this together. When strange things start happening, Emma begins to experience a little buyer’s remorse. What’s the real history of this house? Is its dark history repeating itself? Why does her husband suddenly seem so distant? Is she in danger? Is her baby?
A Dagger of Lightning
By Meredith R. Lyons
CamCat Books
April 1, 2025
Forty-five-year-old Imogen has always struggled to fit in, never finding her passion in life. And while that may include having cold feet in her impending nuptials, that doesn’t mean she’s ready to ditch planet Earth—and her entire life—completely. When Imogen is kidnapped by an alien prince in disguise, there’s nothing she can do to stop him. He’s sidhe—a being with powerful abilities—and he’s grown up used to getting what he wants. The prince is convinced Imogen will fall in love with him, and that her new powers, once she’s turned sidhe, will help his country win a centuries-old feud.
Blood Wolf Moon
By Elise Paschen
Red Hen Press
April 8, 2025
In her mesmerizing sixth poetry collection, Blood Wolf Moon, Elise Paschen weaves constellations throughout, of stars and birds and light and darkness and beauty and horror and nature and humans and history, making shape and meaning of what’s around us and even who we are.
Death is a Mariachi
By Marcy Rae Henry
Bauhan Publishing
April 8, 2025
Marcy Rae Henry’s speaker roams from New Orleans to New Delhi in death is a mariachi, a raw yet nuanced exploration of the shifting nature of identity, spirituality, and place. Reckoning with death through the lens of Buddhist ideology, the speaker technicolors her world: a blue-green whiptail lizard reproduces through parthenogenesis, golden oil glistens in petrichor, even the morphine in a grandmother’s IV takes on a kaleidoscopic sheen. Henry engages texts from 1970’s electronica to molcajetes and tejolotes this intersectional, eco-feminist exploration of the body and the soul, their limits, and their excesses. In her formally inventive and full-throated debut, Henry sings of the liminal, of the “soul separating from skin,” of words that are “useful as bones.” The speaker names what she sees and lets it go. She never tells anyone that she’s time traveling.
The Wrigley Building: The Making of an Icon
By Robert Sharoff, Tim Samuelson, John Vinci, & William Zbaren
Rizzoli Electa
April 8, 2025
This is the captivating story of the spectacular architecture of the century-old Wrigley Building—its design, construction, and enduring significance as one of Chicago’s most emblematic buildings. Through meticulous research and spectacular photography, the book unearths a century’s worth of architectural, social, and business history, shedding light on many aspects of the Wrigley Building for the first time.
Pay Dirt: A V.I. Warshawski Novel
By Sara Paretsky
William Morrow Paperbacks
April 15, 2025
Legendary detective V.I. Warshawski uncovers a mystery with roots dating back to the Civil War in this edge-of-your-seat thriller from New York Times bestseller Sara Paretsky. Discovering a dead body in the same house a few days later, V.I. is pitched headlong into a local land-use battle with roots going back to the Civil War. She finds that today’s combatants are just as willing as opponents in the 1860s to kill to settle their differences.
The Perfect Divorce
By Jeneva Rose
Blackstone Publishing
April 15, 2025
It’s been eleven years since high-powered attorney Sarah Morgan defended her husband, Adam, against the charge of murdering his mistress. Sarah has long since moved on, starting a family with her new husband, Bob Miller, and changing careers. Her life is back to being exactly how she always wanted…or is it? After discovering Bob engaged in a one-night stand, Sarah wastes no time filing for divorce. However, amid their ugly separation, new DNA evidence is uncovered in the case against Adam, forcing the police to reopen the investigation and putting Sarah right back in the spotlight.
The Edge of Yesterday
By Rita Woods
Forge Books
April 29, 2025
The Edge of Yesterday is a haunting contemporary speculative novel about time travel and finding yourself from award-winning author Rita Woods. Greer Coffey is a principal dancer with a renowned Harlem company. Sebastian Coffey is an architect with a prestigious Midtown firm. The Coffey’s are the ultimate dream couple—until their world completely unravels. After Greer develops a career ending neurologic disorder, she finds herself back in her hometown of Detroit. Angry, lonely, her marriage buckling under the strain, she takes to aimlessly wandering the city streets. One night, she stumbles through a vortex, a portal through time that transports her back into 1925 Detroit, where she meets a handsome, charming doctor.
The Perturbation of O
By Joseph G. Peterson
University of Iowa Press
April 29, 2025
The Perturbation of O tells the comic story of how a loser became a winner with the publication of his memoir, Gideon’s Confession, and the chaotic aftermath that the book and an encounter with Oprah Winfrey have had on two people: Gideon Anderson and Regina Blast, a woman about whom Gideon wrote intimately in his memoir. Told mostly in a single conversation between Gideon and Regina as they sit on a spring morning drinking coffee and eating pastries, The Perturbation of O deals with concepts of fame and intimacy, and who has the right to speak about whom.
Up Close & Personal
By Ana Holguin
Forever
April 29, 2025
Jo De La Cruz should be on top of the world. As one of spin’s hottest instructors, her workouts stream into thousands of living rooms, her waiting list is harder to access than Area 51, and even her hair has its own social media page. But Jo’s struggling from a decade in the spotlight—which is when she meets the annoyingly handsome journalist who claims her job is merely yelling at people from a bike.
May
Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History
By Kevin M. Schultz
University of Chicago Press
May 2, 2025
Kevin M. Schultz efficiently lays out the array of objections to liberals—ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian, and more—in a historical frame that shows how protean the concept has been throughout the past hundred years. It turns out, he declares, that how you define a “white liberal” is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing your own anxieties. With a tight command of postwar American history and a spirited yet accessible voice, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals) is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand—and envision a way forward for—the complicated landscape of current US politics.
Love Letters & Pocket Knives
By J.J. Celli
Central Avenue Poetry
May 13, 2025
In this autobiographical collection, each poem reads like a mini-memoir, weaving together the threads of trauma, intimacy, love, and resiliency. These poems stand strong with brave vulnerability confidently confronting those experiences in life that haunt us so we can quit ghosting ourselves. As the title suggests, Love Letters and Pocket Knives explores the delicate dance between tenderness and toughness.
Death in the Cards
By Mia P. Manansala
Delacorte Press
May 13, 2025
The young adult debut from the award-winning author of Arsenic and Adobo! When a high school tarot reader’s latest client goes missing after a troubling reading, she must apply everything she’s learned from her private investigator mother to solve a case of her own.
The Surge
By Adam Kovac
Tortoise Books
May 20, 2025
Larry Chandler knows what his fellow soldiers don’t—that war scars you and haunts you, leaving you with memories you’d prefer not to face. They’re all National Guardsmen serving together in Iraq, but he’s already done a stint in Afghanistan, whereas they’re fresh-faced youngsters on their first tour. The new soldiers are eager for something more interesting than life on a firebase, or boring guard duty at isolated outposts—and they’re about to get their wish.
The Ascent
By Allison Buccola
Random House
May 20, 2025
Twenty years ago, the members of a reclusive commune outside Philadelphia vanished without a trace. The mystery of their disappearance has never been solved. No sightings of the members were ever verified, and no bodies ever found. But the group did leave one thing behind: a twelve-year-old girl wandering alone on the side of the road in search of her lost family. In The Ascent, Allison Buccola has crafted a nerve-rattling thriller about motherhood, identity, and the truths we think we know about our families.
Check back in June for Part 2 of our Most Anticipated Chicago Books of 2025 List!
