Chicago

Enter Rebecca Makkai’s home city, solve an impossible murder, and fall in love with Chicago along the way.

A man is found shot dead in a locked Chicago hotel room. There is no weapon and no sign that anyone entered or left. Six months later, with the police investigation stalled, private investigator Alex Cowles arrives from Boston to take another look.

Waiting for him is Marissa, a lifelong Chicagoan and architecture scholar who has never quite gotten over him. She offers to drive Alex around and introduce him to the city, but soon she is interviewing suspects and venturing much further into the investigation than either intended. Her private theory: if she can make Alex fall in love with Chicago, perhaps he will fall in love with her.

Their search moves through luxury hotels and jazz clubs, beneath the city on Lower Wacker Drive, and beyond the downtown most visitors see. Marissa introduces Alex to Chicago’s mysteries: Why does its river run backward? What remains of the city that burned? How did a marshy meeting place between waterways become a metropolis?

The deeper they travel into Chicago, the more complicated it becomes. Marissa knows its beauty and the divisions separating its neighborhoods. The city has welcomed generations of newcomers while treating many cruelly, and even lifelong residents can never know it in its entirety.

The investigation leads Marissa toward a new understanding of the City of Big Shoulders. Shoulders are not only symbols of strength. They are how we help carry what is too heavy for someone to bear alone.

Romantic and propulsive, Chicago: Travel with a Writer is both a genuine locked-room mystery and Rebecca Makkai’s deeply felt love letter to her hometown. Follow the clues across the city and discover why Chicago remains as impossible to solve as the murder itself.

About TRAVEL WITH A WRITER

Travel with a Writer begins with a simple idea: places become more interesting in the company of someone who knows them well.

The series brings readers together with bestselling, award-winning, and acclaimed writers in places they know intimately. Some will already be familiar to English-language readers. Others are major literary voices in their own countries and regions whom we are delighted to introduce in English.

At a time when information about where to go has never been easier to find, these books offer something harder to access: somebody else’s way of seeing a city. They invite readers to experience it like a local by entering it through the memories, observations, and imagination of a writer who has called it home. Literature has always allowed us to spend time inside another life. Travel with a Writer brings that literary intimacy to place.

We give every writer the same invitation: write a short narrative about a place you have called home, for the would-be traveler. We choose writers whose work we admire and trust their instincts about how best to bring a place to life. What each writer makes of the invitation is entirely their own.

Original writing is accompanied by curated walks, maps, infographics, and cultural recommendations, allowing readers who do travel to follow the writer’s perspective off the page and into the place itself.

Read a book before a trip, carry it through a city, return to it after coming home, or travel entirely from home.

Author by author, place by place, a global literary atlas takes shape.

In 2027 and beyond, the series will continue to expand with acclaimed writers taking readers inside cities around the world, with forthcoming and developing titles including Chicago with Rebecca Makkai, Bogota with Santiago Gamboa, Berlin with Norman Ohler, Athens with Amanda Michalopoulou, Lisbon with Gonçalo Tavares, Buenos Aires with Martín Caparrós, Vancouver with Ian Williams, Hanoi with Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, and Taipei with Michelle Kuo.

About THE WALKING TREE

Founded in French in March 2025 as L’arbre qui marche by former journalists and editors Nadia Krovnikoff and François Saugier, The Walking Tree is an independent publishing house devoted to new ways of writing about place. Travel with a Writer has expanded internationally, with editions now available in French, Italian, and Spanish.

Its U.S. and UK publishing program, The Walking Tree, is led by Kristina Kearns, former executive and editorial director of McSweeney’s and operations director of Fitzcarraldo Editions, with Daniel Levin Becker, former literary and features editor of The Believer.