The Great Believers

Oh THIS BOOK 🥹🥹 I honestly don’t understand why this doesn’t have the same level of hype as A Little Life because it has all the best elements of it (beautiful queer love stories and friendships, an emotional storyline that will break your heart), but it’s grounded in true history and has more to it than the trauma. This is a dual timeline novel that explores the utter devastation of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s in Chicago, along with the horrendous way gay men were treated in the news and by the public because of it. Our main character in the 80s timeline is Yale, who is just the most wonderful human being that you’ll be rooting for throughout, but we watch on as the disease rages through his friendship group. We also get to explore the art world, which I always find fascinating, and the later timeline is set in Paris where we follow Fiona, the sister of one of Yale’s friends who we lose early on, who really ended up caring for so many of them and experiencing the trauma time and time again. I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but it’s truly a heartbreaking and harrowing novel at times, and I sobbed for about twenty minutes after finishing it. But the friendships are so damn special, as is Yale, and the Paris storyline did offer some relief from the tragedy at times. This was my first book club pick, and I’m so happy I finally picked it up - the majority of the response was positive, and I’ve personally found one of my forever favourites here. It feels like such an important and necessary novel so we never become complacent.

I absolutely loved ‘A Little Life’ and ‘The Heart's Invisible Furies’, they are a couple of my all time favourite books so when I saw that ‘The Great Believers’ was being favourably compared to them, I was excited to read it. We start in 1985 with the main character, Yale Tishman. Yale is a director for an art gallery in Chicago and is about to bring in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Just as we see Yale’s career start to take off, so does the AIDs epidemic and one by one, Yale's friends are dying. Another character we follow is Fiona, the little sister of one of Yale’s friends who has died. We spend most of time with Fiona thirty years later as she is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. Fiona stays with an old friend and famous photographer who documented the Chicago AIDs epidemic and she finds herself coming face to face with that time of her life and reflecting on what she lived through and all the friends she lost. I found myself absorbed into this story straight away. I love it when an author successfully weaves multiple timelines together and draws out our learnings of the characters over time. The parallel paths is one of my favourite narratives, it isn’t easy to do but here it is done really well. This book is heartbreaking and joyous in equal measure. The characters are rich and it’s easy to love them with all their faults, triumphs and struggles, especially Yale. I liked finding out about how the AIDS crisis affected the community in an American city in the eighties from a human and social perspective because this was not something I lived through. We see the very best and the very worst of humanity when faced with a medical and humanitarian crisis and it felt like this was portrayed well. The storyline of Yale getting the art collection was excellent and his relationship and work dramas but there were a few of Fiona’s chapters in Paris that seemed a bit drawn out, they seemed to slow the story down somewhat and I never really understood the estrangement of Claire from Fiona or the importance of Kurt…it seemed like a bit of an afterthought storyline. Same with the guy Fiona met on the plane.. Overall I enjoyed this book and I’ll search out more from this author.

Beautiful, moving - an incredibly well written novel.

I loved this book and would like to read more like it, or by this author. I felt very sorry for Yale and for Fiona. By the end of the book I hated manipulative and hypocritical Bill and was deeply aggravated by shallow Roman. I would have liked to know more about Charlie's story, and seen things through his eyes too, even though he was not a nice character. I think his tragedy was that he probably did love Yale, even while he did bad,stupid and selfish things and treated him badly. I do think that Yale deserved better than Charlie - and for better things to happen to him - but when has the world ever been fair? I enjoyed reading about how the AIDS crisis affected the community in an American city in the eighties because it is a subject that fascinates me, from a human and social perspective. The very best and the very worst of humanity when faced with a medical and humanitarian crisis. Also the legacy of this time: both good and bad. It is a positive thing that fiction is now exploring the AIDS crisis, its effects and after-shocks in this multi-dimensional and retrospective way, at a time when it seems to be fading from people's minds, when some people are either denying or diminishing its horror, its impact upon a whole generation. And especially when a new generation, who never experienced what the previous one went through, are sometimes ignorant of this holocaust and of what they could learn from it.

This is simply a remarkably good book. How Makkai wove together this story so well is somewhat beyond me. But be warned. If you were there in the 80s and early 90s, if you lost loved ones to AIDS - this book is hard. Every.single.page is poignant, alive, and either distinctively heartbreaking or foreshadowing heartbreak. The characters are rich and 3 dimensional. Makkai digs into each, flushes out the main character, and presents balance. You love these people, their faults, their triumphs, their struggles. And Yale? You love him most of all - as is right. I could go on and on, but I won't. Just read this book.

The jumping between the 80s and 2015 is cleverly brought together at the end. Strong characterisation though clinically told story.

She does one of my favourite narrative devices of moving between times and slowly revealing the timeline of the characters to you with huge poignancy and such detail of each era and person. A moving lovely book.

Like many reviewers I grit the narrative set in the present day to be unconvincing and unnecessary. I read a couple of chapters and then skipped them The other more central narrative set in the 80s and 90s worked fine as a stand alone. It took a while to get into the characters and the plot but by the end I was thoroughly immersed and carried along by the story. Considering it was written by someone who wasn’t alive when AIDS was ripping through the gay community it rang true to my memories of that horrible time.

I found this book really hard to put down. The characters were so well drawn and I really had to find out what happened to them. I also learned a lot about the times.

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I think this book is amazing, it is well written and page turning but mostly it does bring you back to another time and place, to another era. I was in tears for the characters of the books, and for everyone who was really there, diying of AIDS. The books is not always and only sad, though, and the main feeling is that is describing real people and real life.

First I wish to thank the author for such an amazing book. It succeeded to bring to life for a new generation a reminder of the brave & beautiful people who lived & succumbed to horror of AIDS. Well written but o so hard to read.

I don't usually write reviews here as I read a lot, but I couldn't help writing a bit about this book because I really loved it. I couldn't put it down, it is very well written but easy to read at the same time. I found the characters very interesting and complex, which is hard to find these days, I think. I was really moved by the experiences of them all. I also learnt about what happened during the AIDS epidemic in Chicago and the US, it's really well documented, as the author explains at the end. Being the novel about AIDS and the gay community I found that it trascended these topics to talk about friendship, love, motherhood, forgiveness and many other topics that matter to all of us. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to spend a great time reading about interesting characters, relationships, friendship and love.