The author of The Virgin Suicides won a Pulitzer Prize for this long-awaited second novel. In it, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a Grosse Pointe girls' school in 1974, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively...  more

The author of The Virgin Suicides won a Pulitzer Prize for this long-awaited second novel. In it, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a Grosse Pointe girls' school in 1974, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop physically - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, "Cal" is not really a girl at all, and he tries to determine his true identity as he traces the rare gene responsible for his condition through his Detroit Greek family, back to the grandparents who fled to America after the Turks sacked Smyrna in 1922. Jeffrey Eugenides' novel is a grand fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, difficult promptings of desire. "Epic and wondrous. Middlesex begins as a generous, tragi-comic family chronicle of immigration and assimilation, becomes along the way a social novel about Detroit, perhaps the most symbolic of American cities, and incorporates a heart-breaking tale of growing up awkward and lonely in '70s suburbia. It's a big, affectionate, often hilarious book."