Jake and Fiona eventually sleep together.

On the plane she meets a handsome, younger man named Jake Austen. From this interaction, Charlie contracts HIV, though this is not revealed until later in the novel. While he and Yale are separated, Charlie Keene-Yale’s boyfriend-sleeps with Julian Ames, an actor and friend in the group. While Yale is lying down upstairs, the group goes to Nico’s apartment. Nico, one of Yale’s friends, has died of AIDS though his family refuses to admit this fact. The Great Believers opens with a scene of Nico’s funeral.

These chapters are narrated in the third-person limited perspective and switch between 2015, on the one hand, and 1985-1986 on the other. The novel’s chapters alternate between two characters: Yale Tishman, a gay man working in the arts industry in 1980s Chicago, and Fiona Marcus, a friend of Yale’s who travels to Paris in 2015 in order to reconnect with her estranged daughter. The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai is a novel dealing with the 1980s AIDS crisis in Chicago. The American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction and the Stonewall Barbara Gittings Literature Award.The following version of the book was used to create this study guide: Makkai, Rebecca.One of New York Time's 10 Best Books of 2018.A finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.The Great Believers received the following honors: Yale and Fiona’s intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of 80’s and the chaos of the modern world, as both struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster. 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. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult.

Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister. 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. In 1985, 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 a novel