'Makkai has created a moving story about Chicago and Paris, the past and present, the young men lost to AIDS and the ones who survived. 'Stirring, spellbinding and full of life.' - Téa Obreht, New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger's Wife This should strike a chord with the Gen Xers who came of age, and then aged, in these tumultuous years.' - Library Journal 'Makkai's sweeping fourth novel (after Music for Wartime) shows the compassion of chosen families and the tension and distance that can exist in our birth ones. This novel will undoubtedly touch the hearts and minds of readers.' - Publishers Weekly

A tribute to the enduring forces of love and art, over everything.' - Booklist As compulsively readable as it is thoughtful and moving: an unbeatable fictional combination.' - Kirkus

her rich portraits of an array of big personalities and her affecting depiction of random, horrific death faced with varying degrees of gallantry make this tender, keening novel an impressive act of imaginative empathy. Another ambitious change of pace for the versatile and accomplished Makkai. While I enjoyed the 1980s strand, there's a near-contemporary story-line that's not compelling additionally, there are a lot of secondary characters we don't get to know very well and the details of Yale's art deal slows down the narrative.' - Rebecca Foster, BookBrowse 'Unfortunately, I found The Great Believers hard going. 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, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai.

Review of the great believers