It is my great hope that this book will lead the curious to read direct, personal accounts of the AIDS crisis-and that any places where I’ve gotten the details wrong might inspire people to tell their own stories.’ She discusses the issue at greater length in Lit Hub.

) I wondered if there was a similar issue with ‘The Great Believers.’ Makkai addresses the issue in her acknowledgements, where she writes: ‘This project was undertaken with a great deal of ongoing thought and conversation about the line between allyship and appropriation-a line that might feel different to different readers. (If you’re not familiar with the issue, the Los Angeles Times has a good writeup here. As I was finishing this book, the ‘American Dirt’ controversy about cultural appropriation and racial stereotyping in that new novel was playing out online. Yale gives Fiona power of attorney over his medical care after his parents have little to do with him. Nico’s family, for example, excludes his gay friends and his partner, Terrence, from his funeral in an attempt to deny they even exist. And we also see the discrimination gay men faced from society and their own families. We see the tell-tale purple lesions, the indifference from the federal government and the health-care industry to fighting the disease, and the consequences of unprotected sex.

Makkai did a good job recalling the tremendous fear and ignorance surrounding AIDS and homosexuality during the Reagan era. As both timelines progress, they recreate Chicago in the late 80s and early 90s as AIDS ravages that city’s gay community in Boystown, and Yale and Fiona lose friends, lovers and acquaintances one by one, like: In Fiona’s chapters, we see her searching for her estranged daughter, Claire, who has fled from a cult and moved to Paris with her toddler-aged child. The donation is complicated by Nora’s family, who instead want to cash in on the collection’s value. The paintings are being donated by Nora, Fiona’s elderly aunt, who studied to be an artist in Paris before and after World War I, and who rubbed elbows with Modigliani and other artists of that era, and collected some of their works. As their point-of-view chapters alternate, we see Yale work to bring a big art donation to a gallery at Northwestern University, where he works.

Fiona is Nico’s younger sister and, although she is a reappearing character in Yale’s timeline, her story is primarily set in Paris in 2015.

We meet the two protagonists at a memorial service for Nico, a gay man killed by the disease. This novel, which was a National Book Award finalist, opens in 1985 during the AIDS crisis in Chicago.

Review of the great believers