Middlesex

First UK edition. 8vo. Pp. viii, 529, [7 (blank)]. Black cloth boards, stamped in crimson foil to spine. Red endpapers, black ribbon marker.

Signed and dated by the author at the Ilkley Literature Festival, on 12th October 2002.

Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Shortlisted for the 2003 International Dublin Literary Award. Nominated for the 2002 National Book Critics' Circle Award. 2002 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. A June 2007 'pick' by Oprah. Chosen by Granta Magazine (Summer 1996), as one of the Best of Young American Novelists. The author's second book following his breakthrough debut novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993). "The Obscure Object," a short story culled from Middlesex, was published in the July 29, 2002, issue of The New Yorker.

"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 1974." A kaleidoscopic Bildungsroman spanning three generations of a Greek-American family, carrier of an inherited recessive gene, which gives full expression in the body of a teenage girl.

This picaresque epic, nine years in the writing after many false starts by the author in search of the 'right' narrative voice, was partly inspired by the diary of a 19th-century intersex French schoolgirl, Herculine Barbin. (This memoir was originally published in 1978 by Éditions Gallimard and in an English translation by Pantheon Books in 1980, in both instances with a critical introduction by Michel Foucault).

"A towering achievement... [Eugenides] has emerged as the great American writer that many of us suspected him of being." –Los Angeles Times Book Review