Author Event

Join the staff of Lake Forest Book Store for a public presentation and book signing by John Flanagan for his new book at Warren-Newport Public Library in Gurnee.

Books Available for Purchase and Signing

For more information or registration visit Warren-Newport Public Library website

Join us at Froggy's French Cafe as we celebrate Kraig W. Moreland's and Toby Jones' new book chronicling a local unsolved crime.

Books will be available for purchase and signing

$45 for individual/$80 per couple

Reservations required. Call 847-234-4420

In October of 1928, in the quaint north shore Chicago suburb of Lake Bluff, 30-year-old Elfrieda Knaak was found naked in the basement of the Village Hall, propped up next to the furnace, with burns over more than half of her body... but still alive! To this day –- 90 years later -- no one knows how she got there or how she was so badly burned. This stranger-than-fiction story is told through the eyes of Griff Morgan, a young orphan boy, whose harrowing journey makes him an accidental witness to what still remains one of the most puzzling, unsolved crimes of the early 1900s.

This is the first historical fiction book project for Kraig W. Moreland. Kraig has lived in Lake Bluff, Illinois his entire life. After working 10 years in advertising and marketing, he founded New Vision Athletics, Inc. in 1996, a privately-held sports league on the north shore of Chicago. Kraig and his wife Jennifer have raised their four children in Lake Bluff. They also co-founded the Margo Moreland Charitable Foundation in 1999, which supports children afflicted with Cerebral Palsy. Kraig has a great passion for film and local history. Over the last 15 years, he has helped write and co-produce the Lake Bluff Ghost Walk. In 2011, Kraig wrote, filmed, and produced a two-hour documentary "A Childhood Lost & Found - A Journey back to The Lake Bluff Children's Home," a heart-felt story of the Lake Bluff Orphanage, the children who lived there and the people who cared for them. The film was awarded a "Superior Award" from the Illinois Association of Museums in 2012. He is the recipient of the 2012 I Care Award, and also an honorary Paul Harris Fellow Rotary award,. Kraig was a featured speaker at Rosalind Franklin University Medical School in 2014 for the TedMed Live talk.

Toby Jones has been writing since his early high school years. He studied Creative Writing at DePauw University and then earned a Masters of Divinity at Princeton Seminary. He went on to teach English at both the high school and college levels, including a four-year stint at Phillips Exeter Academy. The Furnace Girl is Toby’s first collaborative effort and foray into historical fiction. His previous two books, The Gospel According to Rock and The Way of Jesus focused on Toby’s spiritual journey. He currently serves at Congregational/UCC church in Gaylord, Michigan as part-time pastor, which allows him to continue writing, teaching, and counseling. Those in the Chicagoland area will be interested to know that Toby was one of the founders of Lake County P.A.D.S. – Public Action to Deliver Shelter. He served as its Director in the late 1980s. In the mid-1990s, Toby was awarded an N.E.H. grant to study the Depression Era in American History. He was also named a Klingenstein Fellow by Columbia’s Teachers’ College in 1996.

Join the staff of Lake Forest Book Store in welcoming Laura Holtz, author of the new book, Warm Transfer

Books available for purchase and signing

Refreshments will be served

Call 847-234-4420

For any woman who has sought to reinvent herself comes a story of courage, potential and finding joy. Tamsen Peel has lost all hope. Devastated by the challenges in her marriage, she struggles desperately to find herself, and in doing so, she discovers a warm transfer.  By definition, "WARM TRANSFER /warm ˈtrænsfər/ (noun) The act of a customer service representative remaining on the line with their caller until that caller is successfully transferred to another agent." Metaphorically speaking, a warm transfer happens any time we help others find safe passage to their destination. Warm transfers move us forward, and they are at the heart of Tamsen's journey.

In a romantic and sometimes humorous story, Warm Transfer drops us into an affluent world of scandals and secrets. Tamsen's husband Victor owns a successful advertising agency, and his income supports the Peel's lavish lifestyle in the uppermost echelon of Chicago society. Inside the clutch of Victor's controlling ways, however, Tamsen has misplaced her sense of identity. Just as she has given up the dream she could ever have more, Whit, a handsome young musician, leans his beat-up bike against the iron fence of the Peel's Astor Street brownstone. Quickly, Tamsen finds an unlikely companion in his kindred, tortured soul. Despite their age difference, the two discover common ground in hot tea and their mutual love for the French novel The Count of Monte Cristo. It's only a matter of time before their friendship intensifies, and Tamsen must face the questions that haunt her: can she reclaim the woman she was in her life before Victor? Is the detriment to her children worth it? Is she worth it?

Join us at Lake Forest Book Store as we welcome Linda Meyer and Alex Meyer, the mother/daughter team behind Veganosity.com as they share their new cookbook.

Books available for purchase and signing

Refreshments will be served

For more information, call 847-234-4420

Named one of the best new cookbooks for summer by The Washington Post!.  All your favorite BBQ dishes made deliciously plant-based! Great Vegan BBQ Without a Grill is the easy and convenient way to BBQ anywhere, anytime while keeping to your healthy vegan lifestyle. Linda Meyer and her daughter Alex take you on a tour of America's best BBQ, inspired by their family road trips to South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas and more. They'll show you how to easily replicate the smoky flavors and textures of classic BBQ meats using a grill pan or cast iron skillet--no outdoor grill or smoker required!

Sink your teeth into Texas BBQ Brisket dripping with Big Mama's Homemade BBQ Sauce, and win the war on bland, crumbling veggie burgers with Smoky Chipotle BBQ Black Bean Burgers. Featuring more than 70 recipes, each paired with a mouthwatering photo, you can create a real hoedown with dishes such as "Honey" BBQ Ribz, Beer Braised Pulled "Pork" Sandwiches, BBQ Jerk Chick'n and Carolina Coleslaw. These amazing recipes will become your go-to vegan choices for all your BBQ cravings.

Linda Meyer and her daughter Alex run the vegan food blog Veganosity. They've had recipes featured on the websites of The Kitchn, One Green Planet, PETA, Shape, Fitness, Better Homes and Gardens and Vegan Food & Living. They have also done recipe development for many common food brands such as Dole, Silk, Barilla, Kellogg and more. Linda and Alex live in Chicago.

Lake Forest Book Store partnering with the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society host Nina Barrett for a book discussion and signing

Books available for purchase and signing

Refreshments will be served

For more information, call 847-234-4420

In 1924, University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were young, rich, and looking for a thrill. The crime that came next--the brutal, cold-blood murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks--would come to captivate the country and unfold into what many dubbed the crime of the century. As the decades passed, the mythology surrounding the unlikely killers continued to capture the interest of new generations, spawning numerous books, fictionalizations, and dramatizations. In The Leopold and Loeb Files, author Nina Barrett returns to the primary sources--confessions, interrogation transcripts, psychological reports, and more--the kind of rare, pre-computer court documents that were usually destroyed as a matter of course. Until now, these documents have not been part of the murder's central narrative. This first-of-its-kind approach allows readers to view the case through a keyhole and look past all of the stories that have been spun in the last 90 years to focus on the heart of the crime. Carefully curated and steeped in historical context from Barrett, this book allows the surviving Leopold and Loeb documents, most of which are in the form of either transcripts or narrative, to function as both artifact and literature, recounting the moves of the murder and sentencing hearing as well as addressing the questions that continue to fascinate--issues of morality, sanity, sexuality, religious assimilation, parental grief and responsibility, remorse, and the use of the death penalty. This comprehensive, ephemera-driven history allows the reader to act as a fly on the wall and speaks powerfully to the unsolved mysteries of this distinct crime, in which the guilt of the perpetrators is unambiguous but almost everything else is open to interpretation.

Nina Barrett, a graduate of both Yale University and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, is the author of three books and numerous articles, essays, and reviews. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Nation, among other places. In 2009, she curated an exhibition for Northwestern called The Murder That Wouldn't Die, which inspired The Leopold and Loeb Files. Barrett is also the founder and owner of Bookends & Beginnings, an independent bookstore in Evanston, Illinois.

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Join us for lunch with Gretchen Anthony as she presents her newly published book

Wednesday, October 17th, 2018 at 11:30 AM - 1:30 PM

$45 includes lunch and a copy of the book

Reservations required. Call 847-234-4420

A formidable matriarch learns the hard way that no family is perfect in this witty, sparkling debut novel. Violet Baumgartner has opened her annual holiday letter the same way for the past three decades. And this year she's going to throw her husband, Ed, a truly perfect retirement party, one worthy of memorializing in her upcoming letter. But the event becomes a disaster when, in front of two hundred guests, Violet learns her daughter Cerise has been keeping a shocking secret from her, shattering Violet's carefully constructed world.In an epic battle of wills, Violet goes to increasing lengths to wrest back control of her family, infuriating Cerise and snaring their family and friends in a very un-Midwestern, un-Baumgartner type of dramatics. And there will be no explaining away the consequences in this year's Baumgartner holiday letter...Full of humor, emotion and surprises at every turn, Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners brings to life a remarkable cast of quirky, deeply human characters who must learn to adapt to the unconventional, or else risk losing one another. This is the story of a family falling to pieces--and the unexpected way they put it all back together.

Gretchen Anthony is a Minnesota-based writer and humorist whose work has been featured on scarymommy.com, medium.com and thewritelife.com. She's also spent decades as a ghostwriter and has written for some of the best personal brands in the United States, from CEOs to doctors and start-up superstars to BBQ pros. Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners is her first novel. Author photo credited to  M. Brian Hartz

Meet local author Amelia Levin and sample recipes from her new cookbook.

THE LAKE MICHIGAN COTTAGE COOKBOOK

Storey Publishing  $20.00 Released April 3, 2018

Samples from her books will be served

Call 847-234-4420

This collection of 118 recipes captures the evocative food experiences of the Lake Michigan region, an ultimate vacation destination with hundreds of miles of shoreline and rich food traditions reflecting the bounty of the area's farms and the lake's daily catch. Recipes include Helen Suchy's Apple Cake from Door County, Homemade Sheboygan-Style Bratwurst, Chicago's HBFC Original Fried Chicken Sandwich, Beach House Cheesy Potatoes from Northwest Indiana, and The Cook's House Crispy Skinned Lake Trout from Traverse City. Delightful photographs of cottage life and classic destinations, along with profiles of favorite food purveyors, bring the lakeshore's flavors and charm to you year-round, wherever you are.

Amelia Levin is a Chicago-based food writer, chef, cookbook author, and passionate Midwesterner. She grew up in the Chicago area, vacationed for 30 years in Wisconsin, went to college in Michigan, and has since traveled throughout the entire northern Midwest for both fun and business. She contributes to Edible Chicago magazine and is the food editor at FSR, a trade magazine for full-service restaurants. She is the author of Chicago Chef's Table: Extraordinary Recipes from the Windy City.

LAKE FOREST BOOK STORE WILL BE DONATING $1 PER BOOK SALE BETWEEN JUNE 19th UNTIL SEPTEMBER 19th TO REBECCA MAKKAI'S FUNDRAISING EFFORT.  #TheGreatBelieversDonate.  ALL DONATIONS WILL GO TO VITAL BRIDGES FOOD PANTRY

Join Lake Forest Book Store as we host a cocktail reception and book talk featuring author Rebecca Makkai and her book The Great Believers

$45 individual or $55 per couple and includes 1 book

Reservations required, call 847-234-4420

A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai. In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

Rebecca Makkai is the author of The Borrower, The Hundred-Year House, which won the Novel of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association, and Music for Wartime. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, Harper's, and Tin House, among others. She lives outside Chicago with her husband and two daughters.

Author Photo Credit to Susan Aurinko

Join us in welcoming Jennifer Haupt, author of In the Shadows of 10,000 Hills, as she appears in-conversation with Chicago-based writer and author of The Comedown, Rebekah Frumkin.

IN THE SHADOW OF 10,000 HILLS

THE COMEDOWN

Books available for purchase and signing

Refreshments will be served

Call 847-234-4420

Jennifer Haupt went to Rwanda as a journalist in 2006, a decade after the genocide that wiped out over a million people, to explore the connections between forgiveness and grief. She spent a month traveling in the 10,000 hills with a guide, interviewing genocide survivors and humanitarian aid workers, and came home to Seattle with something unexpected: the bones of a novel. Her essays and articles have been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, The Rumpus, Psychology Today, Travel & Leisure, The Seattle Times, Spirituality & Health, and many other publications. In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills is her first novel.

Rebekah Frumkin is a writer based in Chicago. She also teaches writing and literature at Northeastern Illinois University and University of Illinois-Chicago. Her fiction, nonfiction, and journalism have appeared or are forthcoming in Granta, Pacific Standard, McSweeney’s, Catapult, and the Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. Her debut novel, The Comedown will be published by Henry Holt in April 2018. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MSJ from the Medill School of Journalism. She is the recipient of the Richard E. Guthrie Memorial Grant and the Meta Rosenberg Fellowship for her fiction. She has taught fiction writing at the University of Iowa and currently teaches creative writing at Open Books in Chicago. She also works as a freelance reporter for the Social Justice News Nexus and In These Times. She speaks and studies German, for which she received a Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace, as well as Spanish and intermediate-level Hindi, for which she received a Critical Languages Scholarship. 

Join us at Lake Forest Book Store as we welcome author Spencer Wise celebrating his new historical novel.

Books available for purchase and signing

Refreshments will be served

Call 847-234-4420

From an exciting new voice in literary fiction, a transfixing story about an expatriate in southern China and his burgeoning relationship with a seamstress intent on inspiring dramatic political change Alex Cohen, a twenty-six-year-old Jewish Bostonian, is living in southern China, where his father runs their family-owned shoe factory. Alex reluctantly assumes the helm of the company, but as he explores the plant's vast floors and assembly lines, he comes to a grim realization: employees are exploited, regulatory systems are corrupt and Alex's own father is engaging in bribes to protect the bottom line. When Alex meets a seamstress named Ivy, his sympathies begin to shift. She is an embedded organizer of a pro-democratic Chinese party, secretly sowing dissonance among her fellow laborers. Will Alex remain loyal to his father and his heritage? Or will the sparks of revolution ignite? Deftly plotted and vibrantly drawn, The Emperor of Shoes is a timely meditation on idealism, ambition, father-son rivalry and cultural revolution, set against a vivid backdrop of social and technological change.

Born in Boston, Spencer Wise is a graduate of Tufts University and the University of Texas at Austin and worked in the editorial departments at Sports Illustrated and Time Out New York. His work has appeared in Narrative magazine, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Florida Review, and New Ohio Review. He is the winner of the 2017 Gulf Coast Prize in nonfiction. Wise teaches at Florida State University and lives in Tallahassee.

Author photo by Molly Hamill