Summer, 1999. Felicia "Fe Fe" Stevens lives with her mother and older teenaged brother in building 4950 of Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes. The high-rise is next in line to be torn down by the Chicago Housing Authority, and the neighborhood is beginning to fall down around them. Fe Fe is friends with Precious and Stacia, but when Fe Fe welcomes Tonya into their fold, the dynamics shift. Their friendships fray, as do the structures of the four girls'...

In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England's Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap housing projects. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district's narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes, and derelicts a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrolcolored puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them. Fiends last mentioned...