Year in Review | Arts & Culture The ten best Chicago books of 2020

Add these stories rooted in the city to your reading list.

By ADAM MORGAN

Canceled events, publishing delays, shuttered bookstores—in many ways, 2020 was an awful year for Chicago writers. But it was a fantastic year for Chicago readers, at least when it comes to new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. To keep this list manageable, I’ve limited it to books with a strong emphasis on the city itself. That means you won’t see books set elsewhere, like Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive and Kathleen Rooney’s Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, nor books with broader subject matter, like Mikki

Kendall’s Hood Feminism. Nonetheless, here are my favorite Chicago-focused books of 2020, available at an independent bookstore near you.

Everywhere You Don’t Belong by Gabriel Bump (Algonquin Books)

“I remember Euclid Avenue,” begins Gabriel Bump’s debut novel, set in the South Shore neighborhood where he grew up. Bump’s narrator, Claude McKay Love, is an anxious kid who struggles to fit in. When social unrest erupts after police kill one of his neighbors, Claude takes the Megabus to the University of Missouri, where white students ask if he knows Chief Keef. The winner of this year’s Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, it’s a spectacular coming-of-age story with the rare ability to make you smile and rip out your heart on the same page.

The Beauty of Your Face by Sahar Mustafah (W. W. Norton)

Mustafah’s debut novel opens with a school shooting at a Muslim school for girls just south of Chicago. As gunshots shake the ceiling of her o ce, the Palestinian-American school principal, Afaf Rahman, remembers her life growing up in the city, including the disappearance of her sister and the unraveling of her family. A harrowing work of insightful fiction, it absolutely earned its spot in this year’s New York Times’s 100 Notable Books.

Marshall moved to Colorado last year, but his latest poetry collection is still grounded in Chicago, “a town in love with its own blood, / a blood browned on its own history & funk.” Finna opens with a stunning series of poems about Marshall’s online interactions with a white supremacist who shares his name, but my personal favorite, “when i say Chicago,” is a soaring ode to the city that’s worth framing on your wall.

Too Much Midnight by Krista Franklin (Haymarket Books)

Too Much Midnight is a miracle of a book that spans centuries and continents and worlds. The accompanying essays about Franklin’s work—from Jamila Woods, Cauleen Smith, Greg Tate, and Maria Hamilton Abegunde— make this a Chicago book, since she’s one of our most remarkable living artists. A brilliant