Bette Howland is a favourite of ours at The Second Shelf and with Blue in Chicago, PIcador brings her into print for the first time in the UK. The collection brings together the sharp, bittersweet stories of Bette Howland and restores to our bookshelves an extraordinarily gifted writer, who was recognised as a major talent before all but disappearing from public view completely, until nearly the end of her life.

Bette Howland was an outsider: an intellectual from a working-class neighbourhood in Chicago; a divorcée and single mother, to the disapproval of her family; an artist chipped away at by poverty and perfection. Each of these sides of her life plays a shaping role in her work. Mining her most precarious struggles for her art in each of these stories, she chronicles the fears and hopes of her generation.

To learn more about her, read our owner’s piece about her rediscovery here.

London: Picador, 2020. 21.5 x 13.5 x 3. 336 pages.