![]() Her first, 2011s The Borrower, focuses on a childrens librarian who runs away with her favorite patron, a 10-year-old book nerd from an. A dazzling novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris 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. ![]() She has borne unblinking witness to history and to a horrific episode already in danger-among Americans, that is-of becoming a horror story out of the past. The Great Believers is Rebecca Makkais third novel. Although I can’t help wishing the two stories had worked together more potently, that doesn’t detract from the deep emotional impact of The Great Believers, nor does it diminish Makkai’s accomplishment. The question 'What happens next?' remains pressing from the first page to the last. It would be futile to try to convey the novel’s considerable population, or its plots and subplots, though both population and plots are ingeniously interwoven. ![]() Makkai puts the epidemic (which, of course, has not yet ended) into historical perspective without distancing it or blunting its horrors. ![]() The Great Believers is, as far as I know, among the first novels to chronicle the AIDS epidemic from its initial outbreak to the present-among the first, that is, to convey the terrors and tragedies of the epidemic’s early years as well as its course and its repercussions over the decades. ![]()
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