![]() ![]() The link between the generation wiped out by World War I and those lost to AIDS resonates throughout the novel. It's a harbinger of what's to come as "slow-motion tsunamis from both coasts" crash upon Chicago.Īs his personal life disintegrates, Yale is working to acquire the collection of a former muse, Nora, who sat for a host of prominent artists during the interwar period in Paris. When Yale naps during the so-called festivities and wakes to find the attendees missing, he thinks "that the world had ended, that some apocalypse had swept through and forgotten only him". ![]() Nico is Yale's first close friend to die, although he has grim mental lists of those he deems likely to contract AIDS, acquaintances who have already passed away as well as those who are showing symptoms. "This was supposed to have been the prologue of his life," notes Yale, an art curator whose perspective we share in the novel. ![]() The novel follows a group of gay friends who are part of Chicago's Boystown, opening at a 1985 "party" to celebrate the life of Nico, who has died from AIDS-related illness and whose friends and partner have been excluded from his funeral mass. Chicago is front and centre – this is a story of a place and its people in the face and aftermath of a disaster it's also a story of hope, survival and memory, of friendship and relationships. Her compelling third novel, The Great Believers, changes all that. ![]()
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