In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, Callie has inherited a rare genetic mutation. The biological trace of a guilty secret, this gene has followed her grandparents from the crumbling Ottoman Empire to Detroit and has outlasted the glory days of the Motor City, the race riots of 1967, and the family's second migration, into the foreign country known as suburbia. Thanks to the gene, Callie is part girl, part boy. And even though the gene's epic travels have ended, her own odyssey has only begun. 

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960. Educated at Brown and Stanford Universities, Eugenides received an MA in English and Creative Writing from Stanford in 1986. The first of his short stories, which have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review and Best American Short Stories, was published two years later. In 1996 he was named as one of Granta’s Best Young American Writers. The Virgin Suicides, Eugenides’ first novel, was published to great critical acclaim in 1993. In 1999, Sofia Coppola made her much-praised directorial debut with a film based on the novel. Ten years in the writing, Middlesex won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Jeffrey Eugenides now lives in Berlin with his wife and daughter.

Sprawling across eight decades — and one unusually awkward adolescence — Jeffrey Eugenides’ long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.