The blurb makes this sound like Edward Rutherford's novels which tell the story of a place via a sprawling family saga but actually there are more sophisticated ideas at play here. Carr tells contending stories via the device of an inset book 'Chicago: An Alternative History 1800-1900' and the narrative of a dissenting reader who wants a more orthodox story to prevail. The 'alternative' history deliberately foregrounds characters of mixed race and women, precisely those 'minor', in his words, people that the orthodox historian wants sidelined. In this sense the book plays out the conflict of historiography, as well as charting the rise of Chicago over 100 years.

Despite all this good stuff, the individual stories that make up the narrative aren't of equal interest and despite being held together by objects which 'travel' through history to forge links between people, there are places where I wanted everything to speed up - but that's always the risk of these kind of multistrand books. Themes of corruption, greed and exploitation reoccur, as well as the struggle to provide clean water.

As a UK reader, it's striking all over again at just how young America is: Chicago is build on a chess game and comes into being at the start of the nineteenth century. So an ambitious tale, perhaps a bit too sprawling for my taste.

This is an original and ambitious novel, which weaves fiction and non-fiction into a chronicle of the first century of Chicago, from its (disputed) founding to its rise as a major city. With real and imagined characters and a variety of narrative forms – diaries, letters, newspaper articles – plus a framing device in the form of a book “Chicago: an alternative history 1800-1900” by a Professor Milton Winship, which lends an air of authenticity to the narrative, it’s wide-ranging in its scope but with all the many strands cleverly held together by objects that pass down through the generations – an old painting, a silver watch, a dented copper kettle – so that the disparate stories and characters become part of a coherent whole. A wide variety of characters are depicted, form the alleged founder, to the indigenous people, entrepreneurs, immigrants, gangsters and ordinary citizens. At times the characterisation verges on the stereotypical, but the narrative is propulsive enough to carry the reader along in what is an immersive and compelling work. An entertaining, informative and absorbing read.