by JeffreyEugenides (Author)
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. 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. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both GRANTA and the NEW YORKER.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 544
Edition: 1st Edition
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 07 Oct 2002
ISBN 10: 0747560234
ISBN 13: 9780747560234
Book Overview: * 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
Prizes: Winner of Pulitzer Prize Fiction Category 2003 and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2003.