LOVED this sad and touching book. Takes place in two time spans: 1980s during AIDS crisis in Chicago and then 30 years later. Most of the men from the first part of the book have died.
Took me back to that time in NY but how I was so removed from it....being a busy new mom. I feel that I was so insulated from reality when I think back on those days of young motherhood.
This is a terrific book. It made me cry at the end and I don't cry too much when reading. Michael Cunningham writes in his
NY Times book review:
The novel tells, in alternating chapters, about a group of friends, most of them gay men, in Chicago in the mid-to-late 1980s, and about a woman in 2015 who has gone to Paris in search of her estranged daughter. I’m afraid the very phrase “a group of friends, most of them gay men” immediately implies the nature of the mortality that’s central to the book. “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. Makkai puts the epidemic (which, of course, has not yet ended) into historical perspective without distancing it or blunting its horrors.
