The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
 
"When life’s very worst befalls us, who are the people we turn to for support? Makkai has written a beautiful and absorbing story about the families created out of friends, and how these families lean on each other, helping each other forward through grief. Moving back and forth between Chicago in the mid 80s and Paris in 2015, Makkai’s characters weather the ravages of the AIDS crisis and never feel anything but completely, heartbreakingly real. This book made me CARE, so much, and I loved every minute."  - Recommended by Erika
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$27.00
ISBN: 9780735223523
Availability: Unavailable
Published: Viking - June 19th, 2018

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. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

 

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. 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. 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.