Author Event

Mike Conklin and Mitch Engel join us at Lake Forest Book Store to present their new book chronicling the extraordinary achievements of a Tanzanian school for the physically handicapped. 

Books will be available for purchase and signing

Please RSVP for this free event at 847-234-4420

Refreshments will be served

Miracles by the Mountain: The Story of Faraja Primary School is a beautiful book that describes the miraculous events that came together for the school to materialize 20 years ago and the success stories that continue to unfold there. It is a testament to the vision and love of Don and Joann Tolmie. Authors Mitch Engel and Mike Conklin agreed that “Faraja is a feel-good story that needed to be told.” In the book they share stories about the Faraja students whose lives have been forever changed by this remarkable school founded in love and grace and still operating according to these same qualities.The photos are both breath-taking and heart-warming and readers should never again doubt the huge impact that can be made by humble individuals with noble intentions. The authors have donated the book & all proceeds to The Faraja Fund Foundation.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Mike Conklin started his media career at a small-town weekly newspaper, graduated to local dailies and broadcasting, before making a long stop at the Chicago Tribune, as a beat reporter, columnist, and syndicated feature writer. He has written for the New York Times, a variety of magazines, reviewed books, and taught communication and writing in the U.S. and China. Mike now has turned his attention to fictional books, having just completed his third novel.

Mitch Engel headed up one of the nation's largest ad agencies at age 37, ran his own strategic consulting business, and eventually was lured into a senior executive position with a Fortune 500 company. After flunking retirement several times, he finally took residence behind his keyboard in 2007. Since then, he has written four novels, co-authored a fifth book, and co-created the content for a popular Chicago tourism app.

Join the staff at Lake Forest Book Store as we celebrate the return of In-house author events as we host area author Christina Clancy as she presents her second novel  entitled "Shoulder Season"

Books available for purchase and signing

Register for this free event at 847-234-4420

Refreshments will be served.

A dazzling portrait of a young woman coming into her own, the youthful allure of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and what we lose—and gain—when we leave home.

The small town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin is an unlikely location for a Playboy Resort, and nineteen-year old Sherri Taylor is an unlikely bunny. Growing up in neighboring East Troy, Sherri plays the organ at the local church and has never felt comfortable in her own skin. But when her parents die in quick succession, she leaves the only home she’s ever known for the chance to be part of a glamorous slice of history. In the winter of 1981, in a costume two sizes too small, her toes pinched by stilettos, Sherri joins the daughters of dairy farmers and factory workers for the defining experience of her life.

Living in the “bunny hutch”—Playboy’s version of a college dorm—Sherri gets her education in the joys of sisterhood, the thrill of financial independence, the magic of first love, and the heady effects of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But as spring gives way to summer, Sherri finds herself caught in a romantic triangle—and the tragedy that ensues will haunt her for the next forty years.

From the Midwestern prairie to the California desert, from Wisconsin lakes to the Pacific Ocean, this is a story of what happens when small town life is sprinkled with stardust, and what we lose—and gain—when we leave home. With a heroine to root for and a narrative to get lost in, Shoulder Season is a sexy, evocative tale, drenched in longing and desire, that captures a fleeting moment in American history with nostalgia and heart.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: In addition to writing, Christina Clance teaches spin classes (the sweating, not the weaving kind) and taught English at Beloit College for almost a decade. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times "Modern Love" column, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Sun Magazine, and in literary journals like Glimmer Train Stories, Hobart, Pleiades, The Minnesota Review and on Wisconsin Public Radio. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband and her two children, Olivia and Tim.

Join area author Benjamin F. Lenhardt for an online program featuring the images and the inside scoop on his new book.

The Monacelli Press  $65.00  Releases October 20, 2020

This is an On-Line event

Books will be available for purchase on or after October 20th

This event is free and open to the public. 

Call the bookstore to reserve your spot! 847-234-4420

Gardens of the North Shore of Chicago provides an intimate view of beautiful private gardens along the shore of Lake Michigan.  The author explores the rich tradition of gardening along the shore of Lake Michigan from Evanston to Lake Bluff. The gardens here are verdant retreats, lushly planted and meticulously maintained. His book includes twenty-five gardens, organized according to their design--classic, naturalistic, country, and experimental. Lenhart's authoritative and engaging descriptions, based on detailed interviews with the owners, are complemented by vivid images by noted landscape photographer Scott Shigley.

Benjamin F. Lenhardt is a board member of the Garden Conservancy for more than fifteen years, and served as chair from 2011 to 2018. An avid gardener and preservationist in both Charleston, South Carolina, and Winnetka, Illinois, Lenhardt serves on the boards of Drayton Hall, the Gibbes Museum of Art, the Preservation Society of Charleston, and the Chicago Botanic Garden.

We welcome chef and author Nicole Putzel to Lake Forest Book Store as she presents her new cookbook.

Putzel Kitchen, LLC  $35.00  Released November 1, 2019

at Lake Forest Book Store

Books available for purchase and signing

Refreshments will be served

Call 87-234-4420 to register

The Seasoned Plate is a collection of delicious and healthy real food recipes by the season from chef/author Nicole Putzel and photographer Claudia Chocano. This cookbook is the result of a beautiful recipe: one of food, friendship, and wellness, told by the seasons. For about a year, Nicole would create a seasonal, vegetable-centric recipe once a week, and during the summer months, the produce for the recipes was literally harvested from her backyard-- truly, organic-garden-to-plate dining. She and Claudia then styled the food in its true edible form--no tricks--and once they were satisfied with the visual appeal, Claudia photographed the dishes in natural, seasonal light. Once the photos had been taken, they sat at the kitchen table and consumed the fruits of their labors. After all, what can possibly be better than breaking bread with friends?

Nicole Putzel is a classically trained chef, recipe developer, cooking instructor and author of cooking blog PUTZELKITCHEN.COM. She is dedicated to cooking and sharing healthy, seasonal food made from scratch from her organic vegetable garden.

Join best-selling author Peter Heller at the North Shore Distillery to celebrate the paperback release of his newest novel.

Vintage  $16.00  Releases March 3, 2020

Green Oaks, IL 60048

$30 for individual (includes 1 signature cocktail and 1 book)

$45 for couple (includes 2 signature cocktails and 1 book)

Reservations required. Call 847-234-4420

From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, the story of two college students on a wilderness canoe trip--a gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence. Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries, and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey. When they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank and decide to warn them about the fire, their search for the pair turns up nothing and no one. But: The next day a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the man they heard? And, if he is, where is the woman? From this charged beginning, master storyteller Peter Heller unspools a headlong, heart-pounding story of desperate wilderness survival.

PETER HELLER is the national bestselling author of Celine, The Painter, and The Dog Stars. The Painter was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the prestigious Reading the West Book Award, shared in the past by Western writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Terry Tempest Williams, and The Dog Stars, which was published to critical acclaim and lauded as a breakout bestseller, has been published in twenty-two languages to date. Heller is also the author of four nonfiction books, including Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, which was awarded the National Outdoor Book Award for Literature. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in poetry and fiction and lives in Denver, Colorado.

Author Photo credit to John Burcham

Join us at Lake Forest Book Store in welcoming author Emily Neuberger as she introduces her debut novel.

G. P. Putnum's Son  $26.00  Releases April 7, 2020

at Lake Forest Book Store

Book available for purchase and signing

Refreshments will be served

Call 847-234-4420 to register

An exhilarating debut novel set under the dazzling lights of late 1950s Broadway, where a controversial new musical pushes the boundaries of love, legacy, and art. Growing up in rural Wisconsin, Eleanor O'Hanlon always felt different. In love with musical theater from a young age, she memorized every show album she could get her hands on. So when she discovers an open call for one of her favorite productions, she leaves behind everything she knows to run off to New York City and audition. Raw and untrained, she catches the eye of famed composer Don Mannheim, who catapults her into the leading role of his new work, " A Tender Thing, " a provocative love story between a white woman and black man, one never before seen on a Broadway stage. As word of the production gets out, an outpouring of protest whips into a fury. Between the intensity of rehearsals, her growing friendship with her co-star Charles, and her increasingly muddled creative--and personal--relationship with Don, Eleanor begins to question her own naïve beliefs about the world. When explosive secrets threaten to shatter the delicate balance of the company, and the possibility of the show itself, Eleanor must face a new reality and ultimately decide what it is she truly wants. Pulsing with the vitality and drive of 1950s New York, Emily Neuberger's enthralling debut immerses readers right into the heart of Broadway's Golden Age, a time in which the music soared and the world was on the brink of change.

Emily Neuberger is an MFA graduate and grant recipient at Brooklyn College's fiction program, and previously worked as an editorial assistant at Viking Books. She has a music degree from NYU, where she studied musical theater and writing. A performer for fifteen years, she performed at Carnegie Hall in Stephen Schwartz's birthday celebration and sang for Stephen Sondheim at the Music Institute of Chicago. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

Author Photo by  Michael Kushner

Join New York Times best-selling author and native Lake Forester, Laura Munson, at Lake Forest College in the McCormick Auditorium (located in the Lillard Science Building) as she reads from her debut novel and book signing to follow. 

Blackstone Publishing $27.00 Reseases March 3, 2010

Lake Forest, IL 60045

$35 includes a copy of the book

Reservations required. Call 847-234-4420

You are invited to the rest of your life. Three women, from coast to coast and in between, open their mailboxes to the same intriguing invitation. Although leading entirely different lives, each has found herself at a similar, jarring crossroads. Right when these women thought they'd be comfortably settling into middle age, their carefully curated futures have turned out to be dead ends. The sender of the invitation is Willa Silvester, who is reeling from the untimely death of her beloved husband and the reality that she must say goodbye to the small mountain town they founded together. Yet as Willa mourns her losses, an impossible question keeps staring her in the face: So now what? Struggling to find the answer alone, fiercely independent Willa eventually calls a childhood friend who happens to be in her own world of hurt--and that's where the idea sparks. They decide to host a weeklong interlude from life, and invite two other friends facing their own quandaries. Soon the four women converge at Willa's Montana homestead, a place where they can learn from nature and one another as they contemplate their second acts together in the rugged wilderness of big sky country. 

Laura Munson is the bestselling author of This Is Not The Story You Think It Is, which chronicles her journey through her own midlife crossroads. Drawing from the striking response to her memoir, the essay version of it in the New York Times "Modern Love" column, and her speaking events at women's conferences across the US, Laura founded the acclaimed Haven Writing Retreats and Workshops. After watching hundreds of people find their unique and essential voices under the big sky of Montana she calls home, Laura created Willa, the invitation, the friends, and the town to share what she has learned with people globally. Her work has been published and featured in many media outlets throughout the world.

Join the staff of Lake Forest Book Store and author Gabriel Bump at Froggy's French Cafe as he celebrates his new novel.

Algonquin Books $26.00  Releases February 4, 2020

Highwood, IL 60040

$65 per individual, $95 per couple includes dinner and 1 book

Reservations required. Call 847-234-4420

"This book is astonishing. You'll be smiling even as your heart is breaking, and you'll tip willingly into this world Bump offers you, because what appears again and again are spectacular beams of light also called love, also called hope, also called family. Gabriel Bump has established himself as a stunning talent to be reckoned with." --Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn't dangerous or brilliant--he's an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home. Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights-era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America. Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don't Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.

Gabriel Bump grew up in South Shore, Chicago. His nonfiction and fiction have appeared in Slam magazine, the Huffington Post, Springhouse Journal, and other publications. He was awarded the 2016 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He lives in Buffalo, New York.

Author photo credit to Jeremy Handrup

Dinner with authors Becky Powell and Katherine Reay at Froggy's as they present the tragic events surrounding a suicide and the explosive revelations afterwards.

Faithworks  $22.00  Released December 3, 2019

$65 individual includes dinner or $75 for 2 dinners and 1 book 

Reservations required. Call 847-234-4420

A gripping story of grace, faith, and triumph for a woman whose world shattered hours after her husband's suicide. Becky Powell faced the unthinkable on May 16, 2013. Her husband Mark called and said, "I've done something terrible." Within hours, she learned that he had taken his own life and, over a period of several years, millions of dollars from friends and colleagues. Everything she believed to be true, the very fiber of her marriage, was called into question. Within a week, rather than planning carpool runs and volunteer fundraisers, she owed almost one hundred creditors millions of dollars and had her own team of ten lawyers. She was also the subject of open FBI, SEC and DOJ investigations-and faced potential criminal charges. And, although she instantly denounced every cent of Mark's $15M in life insurance and promised to repay every penny taken, her lawyers knew that in reality she faced years of court battles and lawsuits, and possible jail time.

Yet from that first horrific moment, God was there. He showed up in his Word, in Becky's friends, in her lawyers and in the generosity of those around her. He worked miracles. CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and others covered the first moment, but what about the last? What about the story in which God gives your next breath because you can't find it on your own? What about the story of a mom and three kids trying to make sense of their pasts, present and future while living under a microscope? Awful Beautiful Life is Becky's journey through the two years surrounding Mark's death and how she overcame. It came down to a loving God who surrounded her, a present and dedicated family, and friends, who made her life, offered her sanctuary and showed up for her and her kids in tangible ways. This is a story of remarkable grit, strength and what the Body of Christ in action looks like.

Becky Powell now works as an insurance agent. Her oldest children, Madison and Boone, have graduated from Baylor University and her youngest, John Luke, is a freshman in college. Alongside her career, Becky remains active in her church and volunteer work, including Helping Hand Home and YoungLife. She and her three children live in Austin, Texas.

Katherine Reay is a national bestselling and award-winning author of several novels. She has enjoyed a lifelong affair with books and brings that love to her contemporary stories. Awful Beautiful Life is her first full-length nonfiction work. Katherine holds a BA and MS from Northwestern University and currently lives outside Chicago, IL with her husband and three children. Publishing credits also include Redbook, USAToday, Christianity Today and FamilyFiction.