Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (September 23,2003)
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.
BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
Even though it was set in my mother’s birthplace, Detroit, Michigan. Even though the story of an intersex youth piqued my curiosity.
The book sat on my shelf for years. It moved across the country with me twice, and then, in 2016, it was sold in an estate sale.
Last year, my husband was looking for some good reads. I remembered all the praise Middlesex had received, so I bought another first edition, just like the one I’d had for years and never read, so he could read it. He didn’t.
Last week, I finally decided to give it a go. And guess what? I’ve now placed it on my short list of the best books I’ve ever read.
Jeffrey Eugenides is an amazing, beautiful, eloquent, humorous, intelligent, soulful storyteller. Not since A Gentleman in Moscow (another of my all-time favorites) have I hung on every word of a book.
Middlesex is epic in scope—beginning at the turn of the 20th century in Greece and taking us to America through the eyes of immigrants in 1923, the same year my own immigrant grandfather arrived through New York and eventually settled in Detroit. We follow the Stephanides family, with all their eccentricities, ethnicity, and hardships, through the 1970s.
Told by Cal, our narrator, the story sweeps you up and pulls you in.
A must-read. Maybe I wasn’t meant to read it until now. Maybe it took me this long to be ready.
See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.