Review
"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
Product Description
The new novel from the bestselling author of Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides.
Brown University, 1982. Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English student and incurable romantic, is writing her thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot – authors of the great marriage plots. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different men, intervenes.
Leonard Bankhead, brilliant scientist and charismatic loner, attracts Madeleine with an intensity that she seems powerless to resist. Meanwhile, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus, a theology student searching for some kind of truth in life, is certain of at least one thing – that he and Madeleine are destined to be together.
But as all three leave college, they will have to figure out how they want their own marriage plot to end.
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