A piercing first novel...lyrical and portentous" (The New York Times) by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Middlesex and The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the coming-of-age experience with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a story unlike any of our time.

Juxtaposing the most common and the most gothic, the humorous and the tragic, Jeffrey Eugenides creates a vivid and compelling portrait of youth and lost innocence. He takes us back to the elm-lined streets of suburbia in the seventies, and introduces us to the men whose lives have been forever changed by their fierce, awkward obsession with five doomed sisters: brainy Therese, fastidious Mary, ascetic Bonnie, libertine Lux, and pale, saintly Cecilia, whose spectacular demise inaugurates "the year of the suicides." This is the debut novel that caused a sensation and won immediate acclaim from the critics—a tender, wickedly funny tale of love and terror, sex and suicide, memory and imagination.

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