My big fat Greek family saga.

Read an extract from Middlesex

Nearly 10 years after his celebrated, taboo-breaking debut The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides is back on familiarly weird and wonderful ground with his second novel Middlesex, a gender-bending family saga of epic proportions.

Ambitious and brilliantly conceived, Middlesex traces a rampant gene through generations of the Stephenides family, which caused narrator Cal Stephenides to be “reborn” as a boy when he’d previously been raised as a girl. Not a “him” in the strictest sense then, but a hermaphrodite.

Moving fluidly between time frames, Cal’s story is rich with history and culture – tracing his/her Greek roots through the Depression, WWII and the Detroit race riots, up to the present - as well as Eugenides’ trademark mix of dark plotting with well observed humour.

Middlesex is a modern fairy tale with a very beguiling narrator, delving so richly into the inner lives of its characters it’s hard to let them go. One piece of advice for Mr Eugenides though – don’t leave it so long next time. LB 03 October 02

Middlesex is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99)

useful link: Bloomsbury Magazine: Middlesex