Enter to win The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai!

Enter to win The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai! To enter the contest, fill out the form below between Tuesday, May 29 and Tuesday, June 19.

The year is 1985 and AIDS has claimed Yale Tishman's friend Nico. As Yale's career begins to flourish, the carnage grows around him-his friends are dying, his partner is infected, and he might even have the virus himself. 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. She finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways the AIDS catastrophe affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. Yale and Fiona's stories unfold in incredibly moving and sometimes surprising ways, as both struggle to find goodness in the face of disaster.

Rebecca Makkai pulls at the heart with this heavy subject, but her writing itself is weightless, which is reminiscent of the work of Fitzgerald, for which the book is named. Makkai is able to draw direct parallels between Chicago in the 1980s to that of contemporary Paris and how the golden age of the latter was forged out of hardship and struggle of the former.

"As Makkai acknowledges in an author's note, when a heterosexual woman writes a novel about AIDS, some may feel she has crossed "the line between allyship and appropriation." On the contrary, her rich portraits of an array of big personalities and her affecting depiction of random, horrific death faced with varying degrees of gallantry make this tender, keening novel an impressive act of imaginative empathy. As compulsively readable as it is thoughtful and moving: an unbeatable fictional combination."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

THE GREAT BELIEVERS is a achingly beautiful work of literary fiction.

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