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The 2019 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Fiction

Finalist: The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking)

An artful novel that chronicles a mother’s search for her estranged daughter against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, and contemplates the ripples of grief affecting generations of survivors.

Nominated Work

The Great Believers

By

Rebecca Makkai

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. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister.

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. 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. 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.

The Great Believers has become a critically acclaimed, indelible piece of literature; it was selected as one of New York Times Best 10 Books of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, a Buzzfeed Book of the Year, a Skimm Reads pick, and a pick for the New York Public Library’s Best Books of the year.

-- from the publisher

Biography

Rebecca Makkai is the author of The Hundred Year-House, The Borrower, and Music for Wartime. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Fantasy, Harper's, Tin House, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and New England Review, among others. She lives outside Chicago with her husband and two daughters.

Winners

Prize Winner in Fiction in 2019:

Richard Powers

An ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them. Fiction

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Fiction in 2019:

Tommy Orange

A compassionate debut that, through 12 Native American narrators making their way to a California powwow, offers a chorus of voices struggling with questions of identity and authenticity.

The Jury

Elizabeth Taylor(Chair)

Co-Editor, National Book Review; Literary Editor-at-Large, Chicago Tribune

Lawrence Buell

Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University

Stephen L. Carter

William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Yale University

Danielle Trussoni

Novelist and Book Columnist at The New York Times Book Review

Michael Wood

Professor of English, Emeritus, Princeton University

Winners in Fiction

2018

Andrew Sean Greer

A generous book, musical in its prose and expansive in its structure and range, about growing older and the essential nature of love.
2017

Colson Whitehead

For a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America.
2016

Viet Thanh Nguyen

A layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a "man of two minds" -- and two countries, Vietnam and the United States.
2015

Anthony Doerr

An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.
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2019 Prize Winners

See All 2019 Winners