Rising Stories

On impulse, a child stops on the way home from school to pay a relative a visit; Robin’s great-grandmother lives on the 68th floor of a Chicago high rise. Lives? Or lived? And is it 68? Or 86? Out of a child’s confusion come a remarkable series of encounters between youth and age.

K.P. Sandwell, now in her nineties, remembers something of her years in Rio—and relives a time in the late 1930s when she had moved from Winnipeg (“the Chicago of the north”) to Chicago itself, had tried to make a name for herself as an artist, and had found the world seeming to conspire against her. Robin relives again and again a tragic twist of fortune that cannot be changed. In the end, the story converges on the Art Institute of Chicago, where the child makes an extraordinary attempt to reverse another twist of fortune—one that befell K.P. more than sixty years earlier.

Rising Stories is a sometimes wrenching, sometimes amusing, always thought-provoking novel about growing up and growing old; about hope and ambition; about cities and skyscrapers; about the world of the imagination and the world as it is; about love and desire; about what God or good may be; and about death and what we hope or fear may follow.

Much as Rising Stories is extraordinary as a novel, this bound volume is extraordinary in a variety of other ways too. It includes an appendix of twelve fascinating short stories (as told by K.P to Robin) about the building of great skyscrapers. (Both in these short tales and in the novel itself, the text touches on the stories of skyscrapers in New York, Minneapolis, Seattle, various Canadian cites, the Middle East, and China and Malaysia as well as in Chicago; an index of buildings, architects, and engineers is included for ready reference.) The volume also includes a color portfolio reproducing twelve historic postcards of skyscrapers in Chicago, New York, and Seattle.

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