very moved by the various stories and how they interconnected. AIDS, Children that steer in a different direction, cults, art, lovers and more all in one. ( )

There's always a five star book waiting to rescue me from a three star slump! I loved all 418 pages - again, a good length after suffering through two bloated novels - and the characters stayed in my imagination even when I wasn't reading about them. The art subplot initially made me worry that I had chosen another A Little Life, or even The Goldfinch, but there are no annoying, whiny bitches like Jude in this story, fear not.

Ostensibly, and the reason I added the novel to my wishlist in the first place, this is a novel about the AIDS crisis in 1980s Chicago. A group of friends, centred around art expert/college fundraiser Yale Tishman, live and love in the shadow of a deadly new virus, while spunky adoptive sister Fiona puts her own relationships on the line to take care of 'her boys'. There are two timelines in the story, with Yale's quest to preserve an elderly muse's memories of the artists she loved and lost in Paris before the Great War taking up much of the 80s, while Fiona's desperate search for her estranged daughter leads her to the same city in 2015. The three threads of the novel certainly feel like a tapestry of plot remnants in places, stitched together from other discarded stories, but the characters make the connections work. Fiona and her great aunt Nora are two strong-willed, intelligent women, although I preferred 80s Fiona to the older woman stalking her daughter for her own sake, and Yale, Julian and Asher are great friends with vivid and individual personalities who really came to life for me. My heart was in my mouth while Yale was battling to grant Nora's wish for her art collection - shades of The Shell Seekers, with greedy relatives out for the money - and also when he and Fiona realised that Roscoe the cat had been abandoned! And of course the lives of all of the characters in the 80s are threatened by AIDS, in one way or another, but I was genuinely heartbroken when Yale tested positive, especially following his temporary reprieve after Charlie.

There are no heroes and villains in the story, only characters who are all the more believable and sympathetic for all their humanity and frailties. I also found the real life inspiration of the AIDS crisis in Chicago to be both emotional and educational, gelling with other, non-fictional accounts I have read like Ruth Coker Burks' book All the Young Men. I loved the dark humour amidst the heartbreak and grief, the honesty about love and relationships, and the sheer ordinary observations which made me feel like I was reading about real lives, and by the end of the book, about friends. An amazing book! ( )

NA ( )

Loved this book even though it was so very sad. With two timelines - one in the 80's and one in the 2010's it dealt with the AIDS crisis and the ongoing devastating effect it had on so many. The characters were very well created and the story well told. Highly recommended. ( )

This book which is about the HIV/AIDS crisis brought back so many memories of good friends who died much too soon. One of the first that I personally knew was a young man who had just finished up his MBA and started a new job when he was diagnosed with AIDS. He died within a year from the diagnosis. That was in 1987, thirty-five years ago. Who knows what he would have achieved? I remember being incensed at a meeting of a charitable group where we were discussing areas to focus on in the coming years and when the HIV/AIDS crisis was mentioned one man said "It's just a few gay men; it's not worth focusing on that." Of course, now we know that men and women, straight and LGBTQ+, black, white, Asian, indigenous and people of all shades of colour were affected by this virus (and still are) but even if it was just gay men why would we let that happen if it could be prevented?

This book has two time lines: Chicago in the late 1980s and Paris in 2015. The Chicago time line focuses on a group of friends living in Boys Town, the gay ghetto. Yale Tishman is employed by a small gallery to drum up financial support. His lover is Charlie who runs a small publication for the LGBT crowd. The book opens just after a talented gay man named Nico has died of AIDS and his friends gather to remember him because they aren't welcome at his official funeral. Nico's younger sister, Fiona, comes to this gathering as she has become friends with them while she helped care for Nico in his last days. Fiona passes on Yale's name to an elderly relative who lived in Paris before and after WWI and acquired drawings and paintings from some of the artists, such as Modigliani, who have since become famous. She wants to pass these works on to the gallery but with the requirement that they be exhibited as a whole and not broken up. Yale journeys to her home in remote Wisconsin a numbr of times and is successful in acquiring the art for the gallery. Shortly after the woman's son creates a fuss because the collection is worth quite a bit of money, the only worth of it to him. Yale is let go and for some time is adrift because he has also broken up with Charlie when he discovered he had been unfaithful. In the 2015 time line Fiona, now a mother, is in Paris to find her daughter who has disappeared from her life for some years. A short video sent to her by a friend shows her daughter painting on a bridge in Paris and on that slim evidence Fiona leaves Chicago for Paris. In Paris she stays with a man who was also part of the Chicago group from the 1980s who has gone on to become a famous photographer. He has an opening soon which will display some photographs and videos from that time period. Fiona looks forward to seeing those images but at the same time dreads it because that was a harrowing time for her. Also, her search for her daughter is paramount. Through Fiona we experience the grief and guilt that all survivors of a traumatic time feel.

This was a great book to listen to. The narrator, Michael Crouch, did a superb job in conveying the emotions in both sections. Highly recommended. ( )