SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM NETFLIX AND ACADEMY AWARD-WINNING DIRECTOR KATHRYN BIGELOW “Fantastic story, a real page-turner. Impossible to put down." – Stephen King From the author of Cold Storage comes a riveting, eerily plausible thriller, told with the menace and flair of Under the Dome or Project Hail Mary, in which a worldwide cataclysm plays out in the lives of one complicated Midwestern family. In Aurora, Illinois, Aubrey Wheeler is just trying to get by after her semi-criminal ex-husband split, leaving behind his unruly teenage son. Then the lights go out—not just in Aurora but across the globe. A solar storm has knocked out power almost everywhere. Suddenly, all problems are local, very local, and Aubrey must assume the mantle of fierce protector of her suburban neighborhood. Across the country lives Aubrey’s estranged brother, Thom. A fantastically wealthy, neurotically over-prepared Silicon Valley CEO, he plans to ride out the crisis in a gilded desert bunker he built for maximum comfort and security. But the complicated history between the siblings is far from over, and what feels like the end of the world is just the beginning of several long-overdue reckonings—which not everyone will survive . . . Aurora is suspenseful storytelling—both large scale and small—at its finest.

The early history of Aurora, Illinois, is tied closely to issues of race and equality. The city had a reputation as radically abolitionist and had a number of stops on the Underground Railroad. Frederick Douglass, the great orator and abolitionist, twice spoke here. By 1850, Aurora had its first "Free Black" residents. In 1854, the city hosted a congressional convention that helped establish the anti-slavery platform of the newly formed Republican Party. At the same time, Aurora struggled to square the Jeffersonian dream of equality and justice for all people with the converging religious, scientific and social pronouncements on racial issues. Piecing together the fragments of historical records from individuals, local churches, social clubs and contemporary accounts in the local press, and using the manuscript census and local City Directories to build essential demographic data, Dennis Buck has created the first in depth study of the distinctive influences of African Americans during these crucial formative years of Aurora's history. The result is a portrait of a city conflicted over its traditional idealism and the reality of its beliefs.

The fascinating ghost stories behind Illinois’s “City of Cemeteries”—photos included! Aurora was the first Illinois city to have electric streetlights, but a dark history has resisted illumination as stubbornly as the chilly corner of the old roundhouse repels the summer heat . . . Learn why Aurora counts “City of Cemeteries” among its nicknames as Diane Ladley describes the nineteenth-century doctor suspected of trading bodies between his cancer center and a neighboring graveyard. Other eerie legends and strange stories revealed in this book include the marauding brave brought to justice in the Devil’s Cave by his own tribe, the sweet legacy of NFL great Walter Payton, and the elephants that saved a circus from a tornado.

"Homelessness is a perennial topic of concern at libraries. In fact, staff at public libraries interact with almost as many homeless individuals as staff at shelters do. In this book Dowd, executive director of a homeless shelter, spotlights best practices drawn from his own shelter's policies and training materials" --