The Marriage Plot: A Novel

A Pulitzer Prize winner for Middlesex, which has sold more than three million copies, and of the darkly delicious The Virgin Suicides (catch the Sofia Coppola film), Eugenides doesn't necessarily need me to rave about him. But I'm so taken with the idea behind this novel. Madeleine Hanna, a conscientious, neatly dressed English major in the early 1980s, blissfully reads Austen while everyone else studies Derrida. (Yes, I remember it well.) She finally decides to get hip by taking a semiotics class, where she meets irresistible loner Leonard Morten, who teaches her about more than signs and symbols. Meanwhile, the wittily named Mitchell Grammaticus, a voice from Madeleine's past, demands that they spend their lives together. A novel of ideas and triangular love from the brilliantly off-kilter Eugenides; with a one-day laydown, a national tour, library marketing, and a reading group guide. Get multiples.

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