The bittersweet, sharply observed stories in Blue in Chicago introduce British readers to Bette Howland, a forgotten great of 20th American fiction
	
	
	
Portraits of working class life that are full of wry, brilliant observation and sly, joyous humour
	
	
	
For fans of Lydia Davis, Alice Munro and Lucia Berlin – we sold 30k copies of A Manual for Cleaning Women (UK TCM)
	
	
	
Bette Howland mysteriously disappeared from public life after winning a Macarthur Genius Grant – this is a significant rediscovery of her work