-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
A big-shouldered, big-trouble thriller set in mobbed-up 1920s Chicago - a city where some people knew too much, and where everyone should have known better - by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Untouchables and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Glengarry Glen Ross.
Mike Hodge - veteran of the Great War, big shot of the Chicago Tribune, medium fry - probably shouldn't have fallen in love with Annie Walsh. Then, again, maybe the man who killed Annie Walsh have known better than to trifle with Mike Hodge.
In Chicago, David Mamet has created a bracing, kaleidoscopic page-turner that roars through the Windy City's underground on its way to a thunderclap of a conclusion. Here is not only his first novel in more than two decades, but the book he has been building to for his whole career. Mixing some of his most brilliant fictional creations with actual figures of the era, suffused with trademark "Mamet Speak," richness of voice, pace, and brio, and exploring - as no other writer can - questions of honor, deceit, revenge, and devotion, Chicago is that rarest of literary creations: a book that combines spectacular elegance of craft with a kinetic wallop as fierce as the February wind gusting off Lake Michigan.
"Starred Review. An evocative, impressive return that Mamet fans will welcome." - Kirkus
"Mamet offers a master class on dialogue…For readers of Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane." - Booklist
"A hard-edged, though elusive return to form from the Pulitzer Prize winner." - Library Journal
This information about Chicago was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Mamet, one of the most extraordinary writers in contemporary American literature, has written twenty-three plays, eight collections of essays, two novels, five children's books, two books of poetry, and eighteen films, including The Verdict and Wag the Dog, for which he received Academy Award nominations. State and Main is his seventh feature as a writer-director, after House of Games, Things Change, Homicide, Oleanna, The Spanish Prisoner, and The Winslow Boy. Mamet has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for Glengary Glen Ross.
If you liked Chicago, try these:
by Amor Towles
Published 2023
Winner of the 2021 BookBrowse Fiction Award
The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America.
by Alex Kotlowitz
Published 2020
A richly textured, heartrending portrait of love and death in Chicago's most turbulent neighborhoods.
by Don Winslow
Published 2018
The acclaimed, award-winning, bestselling author of The Cartel - voted one of the Best Books of the Year by more than sixty publications, including the New York Times - makes his William Morrow debut with a cinematic epic as explosive, powerful, and unforgettable as Mystic River and The Wire.
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why…
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
