A few blended together for me, specifically Asher, and Julian, but a lot of them were vivid and memorable. The Boys’ Town characters were amazing and well crafted. Yale’s adventure seemed more present even though it was set in the 80s. I was less vested in Fiona’s story if only because Claire’s estrangement from Fiona seemed loosely defined and not as exciting. Yale was an amazing character and I kept wishing the whole time that things would be OK for him and the AIDS epidemic would somehow pass him and his friends by, or at least not become worse. It really took hold of me and I was hooked for the ride.

I wasn’t ready for the emotion of this book. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS 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. Soon 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, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself.

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 in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery.

The great believers novel