The AIDS epidemic has proven to be the singular medical event of the past 50 years. There have been plagues of epic proportion throughout history. But AIDS cut through the population suddenly like a war campaign and initially had a surgical impact on a narrow demographic group -- previously healthy young men. Moreover, the sudden emergence of the illness in gay men added the stigma of social condemnation to the physical devastation of disease. Many novels have been written, memoirs compiled, in the wake of the epidemic. They reflect the evolution of the disease from an almost universally fatal infection to a chronic disease compatible with long-term survival. With this in mind, one could justifiably wonder whether another meaningful word could be added to this vast literature. Makkai's The Great Believers proves that writing about well-traveled territory is no obstacle to artistic achievement.

The chapters alternate between the 1980s and 2015. There is a parallelism between Yale’s struggle to stay alive and sustain the memory of Nora’s lover and his paintings and Fiona’s efforts to restore a loving mother-daughter relationship. However, the chapters set in the 1980s feel more dramatic than the sections that describe the search for Claire. The storyline in 1980s Chicago pulses with the energy of the doomed men who inevitably get infected with the virus and die. The race against death and the pursuit of artistic immortality grab the reader by the heart and throat. Fiona’s interactions with Claire are more private and less newsworthy than the HIV events, but they share the same power and intimacy. Even in 2015, the search for Claire unfolds in the context of a public tragedy, the terror attack at the Bataclan nightclub and concert hall near Paris’s Place de la République. The prose in both eras is ingenious and the structure of the novel enlightens without being pedantic. It allows the two eras to shed light on each other. Decades before the AIDS epidemic, the aftermath of World War I followed closely by the influenza pandemic of 1918 decimated the population of Europe and left many young people dead in its wake. War and disease intermingle and indiscriminately cause the loss of young lives. There are young women, Fionas and Noras, whose lives are ineradicably altered by the death of men who they loved and cared for.