The best book I read in 2021:
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
The Great Believers is a historical
fiction novel by Rebecca Makkai, published June 4,
2018 by Penguin Books.
A dazzling novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy
and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris 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.