Seven Years In Chicago: A Journey of Growth | Part 1: Survival

A dark, character-driven literary novel about grief, addiction, forbidden love, and survival in the long aftermath of 9/11. 

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Jack Almanti is planning to propose to Sarah Bryant. By the end of the morning, she is gone, killed in the North Tower while taking a meeting she never should have attended. 

Jack does not recover. 

He survives. 

In the years that follow, grief pulls apart what remains of his life: his sobriety, his work, his relationships, his family, and the future he believed was waiting for him. Every attempt to move forward brings him back to Sarah, to that morning, and to the life that ended with hers. 

And then there is Emily. 

Sarah’s identical twin sister. 

The one person who understands what Jack lost. The one person who carries Sarah’s face, Sarah’s voice, and Sarah’s absence into every room. Their connection is painful, impossible to explain, and dangerous to want. To Jack, Emily becomes comfort, memory, guilt, temptation, and the one future he was never supposed to imagine. 

Set in the uneasy years after September 11, from New Jersey and Philadelphia to Upstate New York and the road that eventually leads toward Chicago, Seven Years in Chicago: A Journey of Growth — Part I: Survival is a literary novel about damaged lives, family wounds, addiction, memory, forbidden love, and the private aftermath of public tragedy. 

It is not a simple story of healing. 

It is a story about surviving the years after the world moves on. 

Book I of the Seven Years in Chicago series.