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.