This is the story of the men and women whose lives were irrevocably changed by the Chicago World Fair, and of two men in particular: an architect and a serial killer. Spicing the narrative are the stories of a cast of historical characters including Buffalo Bill, Scott Joplin and Theodore Dreiser.

It is Autumn, 1937, and although the Depression has lifted, Mary Alice must leave Chicago to live with her Grandma Dowdel. Because her brother has grown up and left home, Alice is alone with her grandmother but, despite feeling homesick, she soon finds she has much in common with the old lady.

The first in a two-book saga following the 1930s childhood of Joey and Mary Alice as they spend their summers with a formidable grandma in small-town Illinois. If Grandma isn't holding their nasty neighbours at gunpoint, she is doing a spot of poaching or catching the sheriff in his underwear.

A novel by the author of Caramelo .

First published as "The Frogs are Still Singing" in 1988, this novel won 1989 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for best first novel. It is the story of Ruth, who grows up and struggles to survive in small-town America. From the author of "A Map of the World".

The scandal that rocked society and defied convention

On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot is fired on a farm in rural Illinois. Lloyd Wilson is dead. A tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers - the narrator, whose mother died young, and Cletus Smith, a troubled farmboy - is shattered: Cletus's father committed the murder.

In this anthology, the only edition in print of a landmark work of 20th-century American literature, Edgar Lee Masters parodies the pious and often optimistic epitaphs written on gravestones, to create a series of 'auto-epitaphs' or monologues in free verse.

A new novel from the author of 'Open House' and 'Never Change'.

The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama was only two years old when his father walked out on the family. Many years later, Obama receives a phone call from Nairobi: his father is dead. This sudden news inspires an emotional odyssey for Obama, determined to learn the truth of his father's life.

'When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.' The tale of Carrie Meeber's rise to stardom in the theatre and George Hurstwood's slow decline captures the twin poles of exuberance and exhaustion in modern city life as never before. The ...

Follows Bigger Thomas, a young black man who is trapped in a life of poverty in the slums of Chicago. Unwittingly involved in a wealthy woman's death, he is hunted relentlessly, baited by prejudiced officials, charged with murder and driven to acknowledge a strange pride in his crime.

This extraordinary, magical novel is the story of Clare and Henry who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty.

They spend their days - and too many of their nights - at work. There's Chris Yop, clinging to his ergonomic chair; Lynn Mason, the boss, whose breast cancer everyone pretends not to talk about; Carl Garbedian, secretly taking someone else's medication; Marcia Dwyer, whose hair is stuck in the eighties; and Benny, who's just - well, just Benny.

If Barack Obama is successful in his quest to become President of the United States, he will dramatically change the face that his country presents to the world. This book discusses the importance of empathy in politics, his hopes for a different America with different policies, and how the ideals of its democracy can be renewed.

The first case file from Harry Dresden, a modern-day wizard and P.I.

Running With The Demon is the first volume of Terry Brooks' compelling The Word and the Void trilogy, a riveting mix of The Dead Zone and Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. A masterful work from a master storyteller