It’s a startling scene to open with, a moment whose eeriness seems more suited to the post-apocalypse of Station Eleven or an episode of The Twilight Zone. Yale hoped for a siren, a horn, a dog, an airplane across the night sky. He heard the vague rush of cars far away, but that could have been wind, couldn’t it? Or even the lake. He saw no bobbing heads in neighbors’ windows…at the end of the block, the traffic signal turned from green to yellow to red. …the foggy, ridiculous idea came to him that the world had ended, that some apocalypse had swept through and forgotten only him. As an unsettled Yale wanders the empty house, searching for his friends: Half-drunk bottles and cocktail glasses are scattered throughout the room the vinyl record spins in silence. When he emerges, some thirty minutes later, he is greeted by a surreal sight: the party has been abruptly abandoned. The actual funeral, for a young man named Nico Marcus, is unfolding concurrently twenty miles north: it’s 1985, and Nico is dead from AIDS, and his family has made it abundantly clear that his lover and tight-knit circle of friends are unwelcome at the church where he is being laid to rest.Ībout halfway through the night, one of Nico’s closest friends, Yale Tishman, is overcome with emotion and retreats upstairs to collect himself. More specifically, it opens at a funeral party. Collectible.The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai’s magnificent new novel, opens at a funeral. 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." - Publisher. 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. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. 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.
"A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai. SIGNED by the author Rebecca Makkai on a literary society bookplate pasted onto the front free endpaper.
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