**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.
