The new novel from the bestselling author of Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides. Brown University, 1982. Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English student and incurable romantic, is writing her thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot — authors of the great marriage plots. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different men, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead, brilliant scientist and charismatic loner, attracts Madeleine with an intensity that she seems powerless to resist. Meanwhile, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus, a theology student searching for some kind of truth in life, is certain of at least one thing — that he and Madeleine are destined to be together. But as all three leave college, they will have to figure out how they want their own marriage plot to end.

A brilliant, funny, and heartbreaking novel about the glories and vicissitudes of young love. His many awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the Harold D. Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Author of Middlesex (bestselling winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, with more than 3 million copies sold) and the now classic The Virgin Suicides (made into a haunting film by Sofia Coppola).

'There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel'. Anthony Trollope 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 suitors, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead — charismatic loner and college Darwinist — suddenly turns up in a seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged relationship with him. At the same time, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus — who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange — resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his wife. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they have learned. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology laboratory on Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love. 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? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

Lefty and Desdemona must flee the Turks who are invading their crumbling city in the Ottoman Empire, and decide to head for America. What this unusual brother and sister do not realise is that a rare genetic mutation is following them. It secretly travels with them first to Detroit, and then to suburbia, through prohibition and the race riots of 1967. And in the spring of 1974, their granddaughter Calliope finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. Through eight decades — and one unusually awkward adolescence — Jeffrey Eugenides' long-awaited second novel is a breathtaking vision of the American Dream and a modern fable of crossed bloodlines, immigration, the intricacies of gender, and deep, untidy desire.