The Great Believers

Set in the thick of the AIDS crisis in 1980s Chicago, The Great Believers follows Yale Tishman as he navigates ambition, love, and an epidemic that is quietly dismantling everything he knows. The book holds two timelines at once — Yale's world in the 1980s, and Fiona's search for her estranged daughter in present-day Paris — and the tension between them is the engine of the whole novel. It is a book about grief that refuses to be only about grief, about what survives loss and what doesn't, and about the specific weight of watching a generation disappear in real time.

Makkai's prose is precise and unshowy, which makes the emotional sucker-punches land harder. She earns every moment of feeling through accumulation — small details, lived-in friendships, the texture of a particular decade — rather than through melodrama. The dual-timeline structure isn't a gimmick; it deepens both stories by letting each illuminate the other across thirty years. What distinguishes this as a reading experience is how fully inhabited every character feels, including the minor ones. You don't observe these people — you sit with them.