A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
Named a Best Book of the Year by
The New York Times Book Review - NPR - The New Republic - Salon - The
Seattle Times - Houston Chronicle - The Miami Herald - Publisher's
Weekly
"Remind[s] us with uncommon understanding what it is to be young and
idealistic, in pursuit of true love, and in love with books and
ideas."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"A grand romance in the Austen tradition."--USA Today
Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there
be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of
feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce?
It's the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are
inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna,
dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and
George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of
the greatest English novels. As Madeleine studies the age-old
motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very
different guys, intervenes---the charismatic and intense Leonard
Bankhead, and her old friend the mystically inclined Mitchell
Grammaticus. As all three of them face life in the real world they will
have to reevaluate everything they have learned. Jeffrey Eugenides
creates a new kind of contemporary love story in "his most powerful
novel yet" (Newsweek).
