Middlesex — Jeffrey Eugenides

Condition : Good.
Bloomsbury, 2003, Medium-format Paperback – Historical Fiction – 529pp. ISBN 9780747561620.

Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides’s long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974 …My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license … records my first name simply as Cal.’

So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Point, Michigan.

To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

“Jeffrey Eugenides is a big and big-hearted talent, and Middlesex is a weird, wonderful novel that will sweep you off your feet.” – Jonathan Franzen
Superb. Warm and beautifully written. Illuminates part of the human soul’ — Sunday Times`
Truly original and compelling’ — Daily Mail`