Books like The Great Believers

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara follows four college friends in New York over three decades, with the novel increasingly focused on Jude, whose traumatic past makes every day a negotiation between suffering and the people who refuse to give up on him. Like The Great Believers, this is a novel about chosen family, about the friends who become the people you cannot live without, and about what happens to that family when one member's pain threatens to overwhelm everyone.

Both Makkai and Yanagihara write about queer male friendship with a specificity and seriousness that treats these relationships as the central dramas of their characters' lives rather than subplots. The emotional register is similarly intense; both books ask readers to sit with grief for extended periods without offering easy consolation.

Yanagihara's novel is more extreme in its depictions of suffering, but both authors share the conviction that the only adequate response to loss is to keep showing up for the people who remain.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong is structured as a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother, weaving together his coming-of-age as a queer man, his family's refugee experience, and a first love marked by addiction and class difference. Like The Great Believers, the novel refuses to separate queerness from the other forces that shape its characters' lives, treating sexuality, race, poverty, and family history as inseparable threads.

Vuong's prose is more lyrical and fragmented than Makkai's, moving between memory, present tense, and historical reflection in a way that creates meaning through juxtaposition rather than chronology. Both books share a tenderness toward their characters that never tips into sentimentality, and both treat the act of remembering the dead as a form of love rather than a morbid exercise.

The mother-son relationship in Vuong's novel carries an emotional weight comparable to the friendships in The Great Believers, showing how silence and miscommunication can coexist with the deepest possible devotion.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel follows a traveling Shakespeare company performing in the scattered settlements that remain twenty years after a flu pandemic has destroyed civilization, while alternating with flashbacks to the interconnected lives of the characters before the collapse.

Like The Great Believers, the novel uses a dual timeline structure to show how a catastrophe reshapes every relationship and institution it touches, and both books are fundamentally interested in what survives when everything else is stripped away. Mandel and Makkai share a conviction that art, whether theater or visual art, matters most precisely when the world is most broken, and both novels feature characters who create and preserve beauty as an act of resistance against despair.

The ensemble cast structure is similar too; both novels build their emotional power through the accumulated weight of many individual stories rather than a single protagonist's journey. Both books also avoid the trap of making catastrophe exciting, instead showing how loss is mostly quiet and slow.

Normal People by Sally Rooney follows Connell and Marianne from their small-town Irish secondary school through their years at Trinity College Dublin, tracking how class, insecurity, and miscommunication shape their on-again, off-again relationship. The connection to The Great Believers is not immediately obvious, but both novels share a deep interest in how the things people cannot say to each other determine the course of their relationships.

Rooney's prose is more stripped-down than Makkai's, almost clinical in its observation of social dynamics, but both authors write about intimacy with a precision that makes the reader feel complicit in their characters' mistakes. Both novels also deal with the gap between how people present themselves and what they actually feel, showing how social performance can become a prison.

The scale is different, Rooney works in miniature where Makkai works in panorama, but both achieve the same emotional truthfulness about the way love and friendship shape who we become.

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart follows a young boy growing up in 1980s Glasgow, devoted to his mother Agnes as she sinks deeper into alcoholism and poverty following her husband's abandonment. Like The Great Believers, the novel is set in the 1980s and deals with a community under siege, though the threats here are economic rather than viral.

Stuart and Makkai both write about queer characters whose sexuality is one strand in a complex web of identity that also includes class, geography, and family obligation. Both novels achieve their power through accumulation rather than sudden revelation, building scene after scene of ordinary life until the weight of what these characters endure becomes almost unbearable.

Stuart's prose has a different texture than Makkai's, more rooted in physical detail and dialect, but both authors share the ability to write about love that survives degradation without pretending that love is enough to fix anything.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett follows twin sisters from a small Louisiana town who grow up to live in very different worlds: one passes as white in an affluent California suburb, the other returns to the Black community they both fled. Like The Great Believers, the novel uses a dual timeline structure to show how decisions made in one decade create consequences that echo for generations, and both books are interested in what people sacrifice to belong to a community.

Bennett and Makkai both write about identity as something constructed rather than given, shaped by the communities people choose and the ones they leave behind. The prose styles are different, Bennett writes with a more traditional narrative smoothness, but both authors share the ability to make historical periods feel specific and inhabited rather than merely researched.

Both novels also handle large casts with skill, moving between perspectives in a way that gradually reveals the full picture of how interconnected their characters' lives really are.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides follows Cal Stephanides, an intersex narrator who traces their family's history from a Greek village to Detroit across three generations. Like The Great Believers, the novel spans decades and uses a broad historical canvas to tell an intimate story about identity, belonging, and the gap between who the world says you are and who you know yourself to be.

Eugenides and Makkai both write about characters whose bodies and desires place them outside mainstream expectations, and both treat that outsider status as a vantage point that reveals truths invisible to people who fit comfortably inside conventional categories. The narrative voice in Middlesex is more playful and self-aware than Makkai's, with a satirical edge that The Great Believers mostly avoids, but both novels share the ability to move between comedy and devastation within a single chapter.

Both books also use specific American cities, Detroit and Chicago, as more than settings, treating them as characters whose own transformations mirror the changes in the people who live there.

Michael Cunningham's The Hours is the readalike The Great Believers fans reach for first, and the fit is close enough to feel deliberate. Three women in three eras live out variations on a single day, each shadowed by Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.

In the present-day thread, Clarissa Vaughan plans a party for her old friend Richard, a poet dying of AIDS, and the grief Cunningham writes there sits in the same register Makkai works in. Both novels treat the epidemic not as backdrop but as the pressure that reshapes love, friendship, and the passage of time itself.

Cunningham braids his timelines the way Makkai braids Chicago and Paris, letting one life comment on another across decades. Recommended for readers who want the same emotional precision and the same tenderness toward people caught between the ordinary and the unbearable, in a slimmer, more concentrated frame.

Carol Rifka Brunt's Tell the Wolves I'm Home comes at the same 1980s heartbreak from the angle of a fourteen-year-old girl, and it earns a place beside The Great Believers for the way it treats grief as its true subject. June Elbus adores her uncle Finn, a painter, and when he dies of AIDS she finds herself drawn to the one person her family blames and hides from her: Finn's partner Toby, himself dying.

The friendship that grows between them becomes June's education in loss, jealousy, and the kinds of love a family refuses to name. Brunt writes the stigma and silence of the era with the same care Makkai brings to Yale and his circle, showing how a whole world of feeling gets pushed to the margins.

Recommended for readers who want that AIDS-era grief filtered through a young narrator's ache to keep the dead close, and to understand the people they loved.

Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship narrows the aperture of The Great Believers to a single crumbling house on the Irish coast and five days inside it. Declan is dying of AIDS, and at his request his sister Helen, their estranged mother Lily, and their grandmother Dora come together to tend him, joined by two of his friends.

Three generations of women who have kept their distance for years are forced into the same rooms, and the old wounds surface alongside a new tenderness none of them expected. Tóibín writes in spare, luminous prose that carries the same emotional weight Makkai finds in her Chicago chapters, letting the disease pull a fractured family toward each other.

Both books understand that a dying man's chosen friends and estranged blood relatives can learn, painfully, to hold him together. Recommended for readers who want that grief distilled into a quiet Irish chamber piece.

Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys is the ambitious Irish epic Great Believers readers rarely hear about, and it rewards the patience it asks for. In the year leading up to the 1916 Easter Rising, two Dublin boys, Jim and Doyler, meet at a swimming spot and make a pact to swim to a distant island and plant a flag there on Easter morning.

What begins as a boyhood dare becomes a love story braided into a nation's convulsion, written in dense, Joycean prose that O'Neill labored over for a decade. The novel shares Makkai's belief that queer devotion belongs at the center of a historical canvas, not the edges.

Hidden gem because its difficulty and heft scared off the audience it deserved. Recommended for readers who want the same fusion of tenderness and history, and who will trade an easy read for something they will carry for years.

Sarah Schulman's Rat Bohemia is the insider account of AIDS-era New York that The Great Believers readers should know, written by someone who lived the activism she describes. The book follows three friends in their mid-thirties on the Lower East Side: Rita, a lesbian working as a rat exterminator despite her fear of rats; Killer, scraping by watering plants; and David, a young gay writer dying of the disease and mourning the lovers and friends already gone.

Schulman ties the epidemic directly to the families who threw these people out, drawing a line between the losses of the plague years and the estrangements that preceded them. Her tone stays warm and blackly funny even as the deaths mount, which is exactly the tightrope Makkai walks.

Hidden gem because Schulman's fiction has long been overshadowed by her activism and criticism. Recommended for readers who want the crisis told from inside the community that survived it.

Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance is the book that gives The Great Believers its prehistory, capturing the very world the epidemic was about to end. Written in 1978, it follows Anthony Malone, a beautiful young lawyer who abandons his straight-passing life for the discos of Manhattan and the summer parties of Fire Island, guided by the aging, acid-tongued Sutherland. Holleran writes the tea dances, the yearning, and the search for love in lush, elegiac prose that reads very differently now than it did on release.

Great Believers readers will feel the ache of watching a community at its most alive, knowing what came next. The novel understands chosen family and the loneliness underneath the parties in ways Makkai clearly inherited. Hidden gem because it predates the crisis that made its subject famous.

Recommended for readers who want to see the beauty before the loss, and to feel the loss more sharply for it.

Rasheed Newson's My Government Means to Kill Me, released in 2022, is the recent novel that most directly extends the world of The Great Believers into fresh territory. Trey Singleton is a young, wealthy, Black gay man who leaves his Indianapolis family behind and lands in 1985 New York with almost nothing.

He volunteers at a renegade AIDS hospice, falls in with gay rights organizers, and finds his way into ACT UP as the movement takes shape. Newson writes with a fast, funny, footnoted energy that differs from Makkai's slower grief, but the two books share the same conviction that the crisis produced political awakening and chosen family in equal measure.

Where Makkai centers Chicago, Newson centers the New York activism head-on. Recommended for readers who want the AIDS-era coming-of-age from a young Black perspective, told with urgency and wit rather than elegy.

Sarah Thankam Mathews's All This Could Be Different, released in 2022, carries forward the thing The Great Believers cares about most: the chosen family that people build when the family they were born to falls short. Sneha, a twenty-two-year-old Indian immigrant, lands an entry-level corporate job in Milwaukee during the recession and slowly assembles a circle of friends, chief among them the fierce, generous Tig.

She sends money home, dates women, and falls hard for a dancer named Marina who stays just out of reach. Mathews writes friendship with the same seriousness Makkai brings to Yale and his circle, treating the work of sustaining a community as the true engine of a life.

The AIDS-crisis frame is gone, but the emotional architecture is the same. Recommended for readers who loved how The Great Believers treats chosen family, and who want that devotion transposed into a fresh, contemporary key.