Middlesex

By Jeffrey Eugenides

Tags: Transgender/Intersex, Literary Fiction, NYT Top 100

Bookseller's Note: While this novel has received much critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it should be noted that the author is a straight, cis man writing about an intersex character and that the book was originally published in 2002. Some of the ways in which the book discusses gender identity are outdated and may be offensive to some readers.

Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.

"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 Pointe, 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, Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

“Part Tristram Shandy, part Ishmael, part Holden Caulfield, Cal is a wonderfully engaging narrator. . . A deeply affecting portrait of one family's tumultuous engagement with the American twentieth century.” —The New York Times

“Expansive and radiantly generous. . . Deliriously American.” —The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

“A towering achievement. . . . [Eugenides] has emerged as the great American writer that many of us suspected him of being.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review (cover review)

“A big, cheeky, splendid novel. . . it goes places few narrators would dare to tread. . . lyrical and fine.” —The Boston Globe

“An epic. . . This feast of a novel is thrilling in the scope of its imagination and surprising in its tenderness.” —People

“Wildly imaginative. . . frequently hilarious and touching.” —USA Today