Rebecca Makkai is the author of the novels The Great
Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as
the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great
Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National
Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times
Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties
of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is
Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.
"Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers is a page
turner... among the first novels to chronicle the AIDS
epidemic from its initial outbreak to the present—among the first
to convey the terrors and tragedies of the epidemic’s early
years as well as its course and repercussions...An absorbing
and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during
times of crisis."—The New York Times Book Review
“Makkai knits themes of loss, betrayal, friendship and survival
into a powerful story of people struggling to keep their humanity
in dire circumstances.”—People Magazine
“Cultural revolutions of the past painfully reverberate in Rebecca
Makkai’s deft third novel, The Great Believers, which captures
both the devastation of the AIDS crisis in 1980s Chicago and the
emotional aftershocks of those losses.”—Vogue
"A striking, emotional journey... Makkai creates a powerful,
unforgettable meditation, not on death, but rather on the power and
gift of life. This novel will undoubtedly touch the hearts and
minds of readers.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Tearjerker… The Great Believers asks big questions about
redemption, tragedy, and connection. Makkai has written her most
ambitious novel yet.”—Entertainment Weekly
“The Great Believers soars…magnificent…Makkai has full command
of her multi-generational perspective, and by its end, The
Great Believers offers a grand fusion of the past and the
present, the public and the personal. It’s remarkably alive despite
all the loss it encompasses.”—Chicago Tribune
"Beautiful, tender, harrowing... [The Great Believers] is a vivid,
passionate, heart-wrenching story."—Wall Street Journal
“Compulsively readable…a relentless engine mowing back and forth
across decades, zooming in on subtlest physical and emotional
nuances of dozens of characters, missing no chance to remind us
what’s at stake.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“At turns heartbreaking and hopeful, the novel brings the first
years of the AIDS epidemic into very immediate view, in a manner
that will seem nostalgic to some and revelatory to others…Makkai's
sweeping fourth novel shows the compassion of chosen families and
the tension and distance that can exist in our birth ones.”—Library
Journal
"Sure to become a classic Chicago novel…a deft, harrowing novel
that’s as beautiful as its cover.” —Chicago Review of Books
“The latest novel from the stunningly versatile Makkai…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
“A devastating contemplation of love and loss…evokes the epidemic's
horrors, yes, but also the profound acts of generosity it
sparked.”—Oprah.com, “O’s Top Books of Summer”
“Deeply moving…Makkai does an excellent job of capturing the jaded,
ironic and affectionately jibing small talk of a group of cultured
gay friends in the Reagan era…[Captures] a group of friends in a
particular time and place with humor and compassion. Conversations
among her gay male characters feel very real — not too flamboyant,
not too serious, always morbidly witty. It's hard not to get drawn
into this circle of promising young men as they face their brutally
premature extinction.”—Newsday
“Two distinct narratives intertwine ingeniously…The stories meet up
to heartbreaking effect.”—New York Magazine
“A poignant, historical journey through a virus’s outbreak and
legacy.”—Conde Nast Traveler
“Rebecca Makkai’s beautiful (literally—look at that cover!) novel
takes us to an art gallery in Chicago at the height of the AIDS
crisis. From Chicago to Paris, THE GREAT BELIEVERS is a
sweeping story of multi-generational trauma and the solitude that
the AIDS epidemic created, as an entire generation was decimated by
the virus.”—Fodor’s Travel
"With its broad time span and bedrock of ferocious, loving
friendships, [The Great Believers] might remind readers of Hanya
Yanagihara’s A Little Life…though it is, overall, far brighter
than that novel. As her intimately portrayed characters wrestle
with painful pasts and fight to love one another and find joy in
the present in spite of what is to come, Makkai carefully
reconstructs 1980s Chicago, WWI-era and present day Paris, and
scenes of the early days of the AIDS epidemic. A tribute to the
enduring forces of love and art, over
everything."—Booklist (starred review)
“To believe in something is to have faith, and Makkai dispenses it
fiercely, in defiance of understandable nihilism and despair—faith
in what’s right, in the good in others, in better outcomes, in
time’s ability not to heal but to make something new.”—National
Book Review
“Another ambitious change of pace for the versatile and
accomplished [Rebecca] Makkai… her rich portraits of an array of
big personalities and her affecting depiction of random, horrific
death faced with varying degrees of gallantry make this tender,
keening novel an impressive act of imaginative empathy. As
compulsively readable as it is thoughtful and moving: an unbeatable
fictional combination.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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