Reading Order
Middlesex Reading Order
Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex (2002) is a complete standalone novel. There is no sequel. The novel follows Cal (Callie) Stephanides, an intersex American of Greek descent, from the immigration of grandparents from Asia Minor in the 1920s through Cal's own life in the 1970s and into the present. The novel is structured as a family saga — tracing the recessive gene that made Cal intersex across three generations — and as a bildungsroman. Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003.
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Middlesex
Complete Middlesex Book List
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Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides·2002·Standalone — Cal Stephanides traces the recessive gene that made them intersex back through three generations of Greek-American immigration from Asia Minor; Pulitzer Prize winner 2003
Middlesex — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Middlesex a standalone?
Yes — Middlesex is entirely self-contained. Jeffrey Eugenides has written other novels (The Virgin Suicides and The Marriage Plot), but they are entirely independent.
Is Middlesex about being intersex?
Middlesex is about intersex experience, but is also — and perhaps primarily — a family saga about three generations of Greek-Americans and a coming-of-age story. Cal's intersex condition is the gene that Eugenides traces back through the family history, but the novel is as interested in the history of the Greek-Turkish conflict, in Detroit in the 20th century, and in the experience of immigration and assimilation as it is in intersex identity specifically. Intersex and LGBTQ advocates have had complex responses to the novel's representation.
Is Middlesex historically accurate?
Middlesex is historical fiction with a basis in real events. The Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923, the burning of Smyrna, the Detroit race riots of 1967, and the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus are all historical events that appear in the novel. The Stephanides family is fictional. Eugenides has said he researched the history of Greek immigration to Detroit extensively.
Why is the novel called Middlesex?
Middlesex is the name of the street in Grosse Pointe, Michigan where the Stephanides family eventually settles — but it is also a reference to middle sexes, to the in-between state of being intersex, and to the long tradition in literature of using a physical or geographic place as a metaphor for an interior condition. The title operates on several levels simultaneously.
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