The Great Believers

'Focused on a group of friends, lovers, and family outcasts, the book highlights the way tragic illness shifts the courses of people's lives - and how its touch forever lingers on those left behind' Harper's Bazaar
Set in Chicago in 1984 and Paris in 2015, The Great Believers is a story of how love can both rescue and destroy us, a thrilling, addictive novel full of characters whom the reader comes to know as friends, colleagues and lovers.
'Makkai has created a moving story about Chicago and Paris, the past and present, the young men lost to AIDS and the ones who survived. And just as her novel evokes art's power to commemorate the departed, The Great Believers is itself a poignant work of memoir' Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Sympathizer
'This expansive, huge-hearted novel conveys the scale of the trauma that was the early AIDS crisis, and conveys, too, the scale of the anger and love that rose up to meet it . . . I loved this book' Garth Greenwell author of What Belongs to You

Rebecca Makkai is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Fantasy, Harper's, Tin House, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and New England Review, among others. She lives outside Chicago with her husband and two daughters.