Occasionally I’ll be going about my day when I get the feeling I’m missing out on something. Then I realize the feeling is coming from being in the middle of a book/story that is “on pause” until I open it up again.

I distinctly had this feeling while reading The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai.

Set in 1980s Chicago, this book is mostly about the AIDS epidemic and how it affects a circle of friends. It is a sad book, and it is shocking to feel “so close” to the carnage.

Yale Tishman’s career in development for the Northwestern art gallery is taking off as he is about to land a collection of 1920s paintings. (The art subplot is pretty interesting.)  Yale is seriously dating Charlie, but the epidemic is starting to close in on their group of friends.

The present day storyline follows a Fiona, who lost her brother (Yale and Charlie’s friend Nico) and afterwards supported many of his friends though those years before medicines were made widely available. Years later, Fiona still struggles with the aftermath but realizes not everyone understands how horrible it was:

“How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn’t they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out!”

Though the story is a hard one to read, I did enjoy it. It provides an account for those of us who have no idea. Ultimately, it is a story of friendships and finding goodness in the midst of disaster.

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