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Rebecca Makkai

Biography

Rebecca Makkai

Rebecca Makkai is the author of the novels I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU, THE GREAT BELIEVERS, THE HUNDRED-YEAR HOUSE and THE BORROWER, and the story collection MUSIC FOR WARTIME. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, THE GREAT BELIEVERS received an American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors, and was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times.

A 2022 Guggenheim fellow, Makkai is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is the artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives on the campus of the midwestern boarding school where her husband teaches, and in Vermont.

Books by Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions for You
by Rebecca Makkai - Fiction, Women's Fiction

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past --- the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers --- needs --- to let sleeping dogs lie. But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there?

The Great Believers
by Rebecca Makkai - Fiction

It is 1985, and Yale Tishman is the development director for an art gallery in Chicago. 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. In these intertwining stories, Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

The Hundred-Year House
by Rebecca Makkai - Family, Fiction, Mystery, Suspense

Violet’s portrait was known to terrify the artists who resided at the house from the 1920s to the 1950s, when it served as the Laurelfield Arts Colony --- and this is exactly the period Zee’s husband, Doug, is interested in. Doug is stalled on his biography of the poet Edwin Parfitt, once in residence at the colony. All he needs to get the book back on track is access to the colony records, rotting away in the attic for decades. But when Doug begins to poke around where he shouldn’t, he finds Gracie guards the files with a strange ferocity, raising questions about what she might be hiding.