She inherits an agony that informs her parental failings - a legacy traced by Makkai with lucidity, as well as ample melancholy. Fiona, as she grows older, cares for infected gay men who can’t care for themselves anymore, and watches them pass on, body by body. Yale pursues an elderly art donor - a relative of Fiona’s - who confides in him about the deaths that surrounded her WWI-era youth he’s confronted with the deep pain of merely living, of carrying on as everything meaningful around him disappears. But the book’s grander scope comes into focus.

Their journeys initially seem a tad too detached, vignettes linked largely by the world they once shared. As for who lingers longest, that’d still be Yale and Fiona.

^ a b 'ALA Unveils 2019 Carnegie Medals Shortlist'.Reference and User Services Association's Notable Books Goodreads Choice Award for Historical FictionĪndrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction Selected awards for The Great Believers Year Kirkus named The Great Believers one of the best books of the year. It's hard not to get drawn into this circle of promising young men as they face their brutally premature extinction.' Conversations among her gay male characters feel very real - not too flamboyant, not too serious, always morbidly witty. Newsday's Tim Murphy wrote that Makkai 'has, in fact, done a superb job of capturing a group of friends in a particular time and place with humor and compassion. She unleashes a mathematics as compelling as her attention to the contradictions within personalities.' NPR's Celia McGee noted, 'Makkai’s writing isn’t the kind that calls attention to itself, allowing the people, emotions, personal incidents and public occurrences of her book to take shape with the force of urgency and the authentic, the grievousness of deceit-by lovers, by families, by hope-and the generosity of romance, sorrow, growth and wonder. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Dan López called The Great Believers 'a heartbreaking meditation on AIDS, loss, and friendship.' Kirkus said the book was 'as compulsively readable as it is thoughtful and moving.' The Great Believers received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Shelf Awareness, as well as a positive review from Library Journal, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Entertainment Weekly, The Star Tribune, The Kenyon Review, NPR, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, and Lambda Literary, among others.

The book is a Carnegie Medal winner, National Book Award finalist, Stonewall Book Award winner, and Pulitzer Prize finalist. The Great Believers is a historical fiction novel by Rebecca Makkai, published Jby Penguin Books.

Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction winner.

Book the great believers