Jeffrey Eugenides

Our summer 2007 Oprah's Book Club pick, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, grabs you from the first line: "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."

The novel takes us back through three generations of the Stephanides familyfrom a tiny Greek village overlooking Mount Olympus to the motor city of Detroit through war, Prohibition and even race riots. The book's narrator, Calliope, is a typical American teenager who finally discovers the shameful family secret that explains why she is not like other girls. Genetically, she is a he.

It took Jeffrey nine years to finish the novel, but when Middlesex finally arrived, the literary world awarded it the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.