It is 1800. On desolate, marshy ground between Lake Michigan and the Illinois River, a man builds a house and a city is born …

This masterful debut novel spans Chicago’s tumultuous first century, showing how a city is made: by a succession of vivid, sometimes villainous individuals and their cumulative invention, energy, and vision.

We meet the city’s unacknowledged founder, a descendant of colonisers and slaves; witness the dispersal of the indigenous Native Americans; hear stories of an entrepreneur, an engineer, a courageous female reporter, and a corrupt alderman; and track the lives of immigrants from all over the world, as they struggle for acceptance in a country they have built.

Chicago, its inhabitants and its history are brought to dazzling, colourful life in this epic tale that speaks of not just one city but America as a whole, and of how people come to find their place in the world.

How does a place become a city? Whose stories will be told and whose will be forgotten? How do you know if you truly belong?

It is 1800, and the future of Chicago hangs in the balance, to be decided on the outcome of a game of chess. Win or lose, the result will reverberate through the next 100 years of history, and the players’ lives, the lives of their descendants, and the city itself will never be the same again ...

‘A sprawling epic ... An absorbing fictional chronicle of a city and its place in American history.’

THE TIMES

‘Brilliant ... Make Me A City explores the nature of history itself — both the official record and the suppressed stories that lie beneath.’

RICHARD FRANCIS, author of The Old Spring and Crane Pond

‘There is much of the panache of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas here: it is an epic story that sweeps the reader from a single log-house to a mass of steel-frame skyscrapers.’

DAILY MAIL