Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers
The hazard of putting out your favorite books of the year list before the year actually ends--you might finally get around to reading one of the well-reviewed books and get completely wrapped up in it and regret not including it. I hadn't read this earlier in the year because I had read one of Makkai's previous books and thought it was just okay, and assumed this one would be just okay as well. But damn if it isn't a tour de force. It alternates from the mid 80s, telling the story of a group of gay men in Chicago and the devastation of the AIDS crisis, to 2015, when one of the characters from the 80s section is in Paris, looking for her missing daughter. That sentence maybe makes it seem like a smaller story than it is, when really it is engrossing and amazing and as you start to see where the stories are leading you are just trying not to start sobbing. Ugh, this was so good. A.
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