“Two parallel narratives - Yale Tishman in the AIDS crisis of 1980s Chicago and Fiona Marcus in 2015 Paris searching for her estranged daughter. National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist 2019.”
What's in this book
- Rebecca Makkai's 2018 novel - the 1980s AIDS crisis in Chicago and 2015 Paris
- National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist 2019
- 432 pages cross-cutting between Yale Tishman's Chicago and Fiona Marcus's Paris
- Author also wrote I Have Some Questions for You (2023) and runs StoryStudio Chicago
- Michael Crouch audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of A Little Life, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and contemporary American AIDS-era literary fiction
Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
The Great Believers is Rebecca Makkai's 2018 novel, the National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist of 2019 and the canonical contemporary American literary novel about the 1980s AIDS crisis. The structural premise is two parallel timelines: Yale Tishman, a Chicago art gallery development director in the mid-1980s as the AIDS crisis is destroying his community, and Fiona Marcus (the younger sister of Yale's friend Nico, who died of AIDS in 1985) in 2015 Paris searching for her estranged daughter Claire. The Chicago chapters run forward from 1985 through the late-1980s; the Paris chapters cover approximately one month in 2015 as Fiona tries to locate Claire while reckoning with the inheritance of having grown up among the dying generation.
Makkai's structural method is the patient cross-cutting between the two timelines, with the Yale-and-the-Chicago-art-world chapters carrying the structural emotional weight and the Fiona-in-Paris chapters operating as the structural counterpoint that makes the question explicit (what does the survivor generation owe the dead generation, what does the inheritance look like, and what does the 2010s reader inherit from the 1980s AIDS losses). The Boystown gallery chapters in the middle third are some of the strongest contemporary American literary prose about a specific working-art-world community. The Nora Marcus subplot (Fiona's great-aunt who knew Yale's art-dealer mentor) operates as the third structural thread and lets Makkai run the historical-art-collecting material that anchors the novel's broader argument about cultural inheritance.
Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Makkai entry point alongside I Have Some Questions for You (2023), and as one of the canonical contemporary novels about the AIDS crisis. Read alongside A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara) on the broader contemporary American literary tradition of intense male-friendship-and-grief novels. The Michael Crouch audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
Related reads
If you liked The Great Believers
A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara 2015 review. Four college friends in New York, slowly narrowing onto Jude St. Francis and what childhood trauma does to the rest of an adult life. Man Booker Prize shortlist and the most-discussed contemporary American doorstop.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong 2019 review. A young Vietnamese-American man writes a letter to his illiterate mother about his Hartford childhood and the OxyContin crisis that takes his first love. Vuong's debut novel.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid 2017 review. An aging Hollywood icon agrees to tell the true story of her career and her seven marriages, but only to an unknown journalist. The TikTok-era literary fiction novel that defined contemporary Hollywood-memoir-fiction.
My Brilliant Friend
by Elena Ferrante
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante 2012 review. Two girls grow up in a poor neighborhood of 1950s Naples. The first Neapolitan Novel and one of the canonical contemporary European literary novels.
The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt 2013 review. Theo Decker, thirteen, survives a Metropolitan Museum bombing that kills his mother and ends up with a stolen painting that defines the next decade of his life. Pulitzer Prize 2014.
Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier 1997 review. A wounded Confederate deserter walks across the Civil-War-era Carolinas to return home. National Book Award 1997 and the basis for the 2003 Minghella film.
More by this author