What do readers think of The Great Believers?

What an amazing, gripping book. The Great Believers tracks two different story lines. Mid 1980s Chicago, the AIDS epidemic is in full swing and Yale’s friends are falling ill and dying. Things truly go wrong at his friend Nico’s funeral when an ill placed word by Fiona, Nico’s sister, leads to a cavalcade of events. At least things are going well for his professional life, where as the director of an art museum at Northwestern University, he stands ready to acquire an extraordinary collection of modern art.

But then the reader gets to watch as assumptions Yale was living with fall away. In the second storyline, told 30 years later, Fiona is trying to track down her daughter who has joined a cult. The hunt takes her to Paris, where she reconnects with a photographer friend of her brother who captured life in “Boys Town”, the gay enclave in Chicago.
So often, I am not a fan of dual storylines. The current one is all too often merely a vehicle for the historical one. But not here. Fiona is coming to terms with the decisions she’s made. Did she sacrifice her family’s happiness to help her friends? I struggled with why Claire hated her mother so much. Her reasoning seemed blown out of proportion to Fiona’s faults. But then, children often hold their parents to impossibly high standards.

Makkai has done a wonderful job creating main characters I truly cared about. And both settings are richly detailed and easy to envision. It was a reminder of how awful things were when AIDS first cropped up, when there was little understanding and no cures. As another review said, Makkai did a brilliant thing by drawing parallels with the Lost Generation after WWI. This was written before the Covid pandemic, but younger generations may also find parallels with it.

I loved what Makkai had to say about survival, especially that sometimes life can be too long, when you are the last one left and the only one remaining to tell the stories, really hit home. It’s a poignant story which will really stick with me.

I listened to this and found Michael Crouch to be a great narrator.

This is the rarest of books. It is a story of loss and separation—the kind that is foisted upon us by death and the kind that is inflicted upon us by estrangement—but it is also a story about the abiding power of love and friendship. It is a riveting, can’t-put-it-down novel. And while the book is heartbreaking, it is also deeply affecting.

Written by Rebecca Makkai, the book is essentially two separate stories, told in different times and places. The first story takes place in Chicago from 1985 to 1992 in a tight-knit gay community as the carnage caused by the new and mysterious disease called AIDS is just becoming known. Men are dying and men are terrified—and men are trying against the odds to keep on living their lives. The second story is set in 2015 in Paris as the sister of one of those first AIDS victims in that ’80s Chicago crowd, is desperately searching for her estranged, grown-up daughter who has seemingly disappeared. There are several unexpected story twists that are truly masterful because they are subtle—but oh so piercing.

How these two stories merge is part of the author’s genius and the book’s brilliance—and the last page gave me goosebumps. Yes, the book is laced with tragedy and deep sadness, but the two stories are so compelling that I still wanted to immerse myself in them. I highly recommend this book!