When Richard shows a photo slideshow of Nico with his friends, Yale is overcome with emotion and retreats to mourn alone a room upstairs. There, Yale gathers with Fiona his partner, a British man named Charlie Keene who runs a publication called Out Loud Chicago Nico’s widowed partner, Terrence a handsome PhD student named Teddy Naples a dashing political activist named Asher Glass and a flirty, light-hearted young actor named Julian Ames. Though Nico’s family holds a traditional funeral at a church, most of the people closest to him-including Fiona-hold their own life celebration at the home of gay photographer Richard Campo. The novel begins on the day of Fiona’s brother Nico’s funeral. Say “McFly” (like Marty McFly from Back to the Future) but take out the F and the L.The Great Believers alternates between the narrative of Yale Tishman-a gay man living in Chicago in 1985-and Yale’s friend, Fiona Marcus, who reflects on her memories of Yale and his friends 30 years later. To pronounce her last name: It’s basically mac-IGH. Rebecca was awarded the 2020 Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contributions to Midwestern Literature.

Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Michael Cunningham called the novel a “page turner… An absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during times of crisis.” The book has been optioned for television by Amy Poehler’s Paper Kite Productions. One of the New York Times‘ Top Ten Books of 2018, it also won the ALA Carnegie Medal, the LA Times Book Prize, the Stonewall Award, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Midwest Independent Booksellers Award, the Clark Fiction Prize, and the Chicago Review of Books Award. The Great Believers, a novel set in Chicago at the height of the American AIDS epidemic, as well as in 2015 Paris, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and the 2018 National Book Award. It was printed on paper made from that one tree that fell in the forest when no one was there to hear it. Her short story collection, Music for Wartime, appeared in July, 2015. Her second novel, The Hundred-Year House, is the story of a haunted house and a haunted family, told in reverse Library Journal called it “stunning, ambitious, readable and intriguing.” It was chosen as the Chicago Writers Association’s novel of the year, and received raves in The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere.

Her first novel, The Borrower, was a Booklist Top Ten Debut, an Indie Next pick, and an O Magazine selection.

She was an elementary Montessori teacher for the twelve years before the publication of her first book. Rebecca holds an MA in Literature from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. She does not run marathons or do cartwheels, but she does know how to make marshmallows.

The great believers book