Yale and Fiona’s stories unfold in incredibly moving and sometimes surprising ways, as both struggle to find goodness in the face of disaster. Amy Poehler ’s Paper Kite Productions has come aboard to option rights to Rebecca Makkai ’s 2018 novel The Great Believers, set during the wide swath of the AIDS epidemic, with plans to turn. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago epidemic, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways the AIDS crisis affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. The only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, he finds his partner is infected, and that he might even have the virus himself. A few days after The Great Believers was published, more than 100 people crammed into Women & Children First to celebrate with Makkai, including dozens of people who helped her make the novel as. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDs epidemic grows around him.

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup: bringing an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Rebecca Makkai's latest novel, THE GREAT BELIEVERS, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, and the LA Times Book Prize and it was one of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of 2018.

‘I loved this book’ Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

A New York Times Top Ten Best Book of 2018

The great believers novel