While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago epidemic, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways the AIDS crisis affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself.

Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him.

It opens in 1985, where Yale Tishman, the development director for a Chicago art gallery, is about to pull off a coup, bringing an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings. 'The Great Believers' is a novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy. Gonzalez Convention Center.īen Fountain, author of 'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk,' former Texas State MFA endowed chair and Clark Prize final judge described 'The Great Believers' as 'a big, ambitious novel in the best American tradition that portrays the interior life with rare subtlety and nuance, and at the same time captures a crucial era in our collective history.' Makkai will be honored March 5 during the 2020 Association of Writers and Writing Program Conference at the Henry B. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize. The prize of $25,000 is one of the largest literary awards in the United States.Įstablished at Texas State University in 2016 and administered by the Department of English, the prize is designed to recognize an exceptional, recently-published book-length work of fiction in celebration of the Clarks’ lifelong contributions to, and love for, literature and the arts. Rebecca Makkai's novel, 'The Great Believers,' has won the 2019 L.D.

The great believers a novel