Rebecca Makkai: The Great Believers, 9780708899137, Fleet, hardback,  paperback pub date: July 2019,9780735223530

A few months ago “The Great Believers” by Rebecca Makkai was recommended to me by a friend from publishing, and then it appeared on the shortlist as a finalist for the National Book Award 2018 and was chosen as one of New York Times Top 10 of 2018 before I finally downloaded the E-book. I still think about this book and wholeheartedly agree with the praises “The Great Believers” received. Set in Chicago starting in 1985, it is a perfectly documented, fictionalized account of the beginning of the aids epidemic and the devastating affect it had on the gay community. Personally it brought back sad memories of a gay friend dying in New York, his very rapid decline and my conversations with him while he was dying.

The novel starts with the main protagonist handsome Yale Tishman, a development director of a Chicago gallery, attending the funeral of one of his closest friends, Nico, one of the first aids victims.  Doctors are only slowly beginning to understand this deathly virus with no cure in sight combatting the illness with conventional drugs.  Yale considers himself lucky having been in a monogamous relationship with his partner Charlie for several years while holding his breath that the epidemic might have passed them by. He is also on the upswing of a promising career in the art world after he established a connection with an elderly friend of Nico’s, Nora,  who is about to gift invaluable art work to Tish’s gallery from her time in 1920 as a model to famous Paris artists.  Nico’s sister Fiona is tirelessly caring for some of her and her brothers friends who are almost all diagnosed with having the aids virus, some of them close to death. Tish’s world comes crashing down when he finds out that his partner Charlie had cheated on him and is carrying the virus.

Alternating between the 1980ties and contemporary Paris, the other story is that of Fiona, now divorced trying to track down her estranged daughter who disappeared with her boyfriend into a religious cult a few years ago. Staying with her old gay friend Richard from Chicago who has become a famous photographer, her old life and memories of losing those she loved the most to aids surface and she has to acknowledge how these losses have overshadowed her entire life and her relationship to her daughter Claire.

Probably because this novel is set in Chicago which I know so well and knowing gay friends who were disowned by their family because of their sexual preference on top of having to live through the aids crisis before the discovery of life saving drugs, I was able to connect fully with this story. What a great book, my heart went out to Tish, his friends and Fiona. I particularly enjoyed the chapters where Yale’s drives up to visit aging adorable Nora, whose collection of art worth millions by now, will make the difference to his career and her family’s fight to prevent her bequest to the gallery.