Middlesex : 21 Great Bloomsbury Reads for the 21st Century ([New ed.])

'I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974.' So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Point, Michigan.

To understand why she is not like other girls, Calliope has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns her into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction.

Lyrical and thrilling, "Middlesex" is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.