Middlesex

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. Cal is born twice: once as a baby girl, and again, fourteen years later, as a teenage boy. Through nine generations of the Stephanides family, this genetic secret has slowly passed. It followed Lefty and Desdemona as they fled from the invading Turks in the crumbling Ottoman Empire and into a new life as immigrants in America. Then it followed their son, Milton, who narrowly escaped the race riots in Detroit and went on to build his own hot-dog empire. Now this mutation is about to be dramatically revealed to Calliope. Cal is a skinny and flat-chested fourteen-year-old with the faint hint of a mustache. But these are the least of her problems, as she holds the key to a unique family secret. Her epic story follows three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City and the race riots of 1967, before arriving in the tree-lined suburban streets of Grosse Point, Michigan. Now an astonishing genetic history is about to be dramatically revealed to Calliope, making her adolescent years that bit more challenging.