The Marriage Plot [Hardcover]

"Eugenides's first novel since 2002's Pulitzer Prize–winning Middlesex so impressively, ambitiously breaks the mold of its predecessor that it calls for the founding of a new prize to recognize its success both as a novel--and as a Jeffrey Eugenides novel."--Publishers Weekly

"A stunning novel—erudite, compassionate and penetrating in its analysis of love relationships... Eugenides continues to show that he is one of the finest of contemporary novelists."--Kirkus Reviews

"With this tightly, immaculately self-contained tale set upon pillars at once imposing and of dollhouse scale, namely, academia (“College wasn’t like the real world,” Madeleine notes) and the emotions of the youngest of twentysomethings, Eugenides realizes the novel whose dismantling his characters examine."--Booklist

"Eugenides’s superb third novel is his most mature to date, the work of an author who has achieved a new gravity after the audacious brilliance of his earlier work... Eugenides looks poised to become a writer on a par with Updike and Cheever as an anatomist of contemporary American matters."--Stephen Amidon, Sunday Times

"Being Eugenides, the book is immensely readable, funny and heartfelt with instantly beguiling writing that springs effortlessly back and forth over the years’ events."--Daily Telegraph

"A marvellous, compulsive storyteller, richly allusive, he reminds us that while love may not always be a triumph, it follows its own wayward course to the end."--Sunday Telegraph

"Erudite, smart and entertaining."--Daily Mail

"...powerful and all consuming. Forget the hearts and flowers; this is a challenging and intellectual novel about life and the intricate human relationships it weaves."--Express

"Nobody is going to accuse Jeffrey Eugenides’s new novel of being insufficiently clever. It is a big book of tricks."--New Statesman

"A scintillating exercise in campus comedy."--Sunday Times

"Masterful... Eugenides brilliantly captures the excitement of intellectual discovery and argument for its own sake."--Psychologies

"Thought provoking and entertaining... utterly engrossing... Eugenides hasn’t just raised his game, he’s changed the fictional goalposts."--Henry Sutton, Mirror

"His understanding of the agony and the ecstasy of manic depressions displays a level of empathy the illness never yet found in a novel."--Economist

“There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.” Anthony Trollope

It’s the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead – charismatic loner and college Darwinist – suddenly turns up in a seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus – who’s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange – resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they have learned. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology laboratory on Cape Cod, but can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published in 1993 to great acclaim and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and France’s Prix Medicis and has sold more than 3 million copies.