Some parts-like Yale’s almost aggressive naïveté or Claire’s tenuously grounded animosity towards her mom-troubled me from a craft perspective, but I somehow love it all the more for its flaws. I can’t say that it was the best book that I’ve ever read or the one that moved me the most. To say that I loved this book would be both an understatement and a misrepresentation. Both Fiona and Yale’s parts address the central question of what happens to our communities when they are ravaged? Who carries on the memories? What does it mean to take on the burden of that mantle? And how do families-biological and chosen-reconcile with lives that can be simultaneously too short and too long?

Ordinarily, when I read books that go back and forth between two narrators I tend to have a favorite, but in this case I didn’t. Makkai does a pretty clever thing here by drawing parallels between the Lost Generation from WWI and survivors of the AIDS crisis. It’s a nice long read about a close-knit group of gay friends and their straight allies that jumps back and forth between the height of the AIDS crisis in Chicago and present day Paris. In a weird way, I feel that this is the sweeping gay masterpiece that A Little Life should’ve been. The Great Believers has become a critically acclaimed, indelible piece of literature it was selected as one of New York Times Best 10 Books of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, a Buzzfeed Book of the Year, a Skimm Reads pick, and a pick for the New York Public Library's Best Books of the year. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery.

A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris

Review of the great believers