Author Dinner with Gabriel Bump

Join the staff of Lake Forest Book Store and author Gabriel Bump at Froggy's French Cafe as he celebrates his new novel.

Algonquin Books $26.00  Releases February 4, 2020

Highwood, IL 60040

$65 per individual, $75 per couple includes dinner and 1 book

Reservations required. Call 847-234-4420

"This book is astonishing. You'll be smiling even as your heart is breaking, and you'll tip willingly into this world Bump offers you, because what appears again and again are spectacular beams of light also called love, also called hope, also called family. Gabriel Bump has established himself as a stunning talent to be reckoned with." --Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn't dangerous or brilliant--he's an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home. Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights-era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America. Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don't Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.

Gabriel Bump grew up in South Shore, Chicago. His nonfiction and fiction have appeared in Slam magazine, the Huffington Post, Springhouse Journal, and other publications. He was awarded the 2016 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He lives in Buffalo, New York.