Jeffrey Eugenides

Madeleine Hanna breaks out of her straight-and-narrow mold when she falls in love with charismatic loner Leonard Bankhead, while at the same time an old friend of hers resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is his destiny. "It's the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to the Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George...

Jeffrey Eugenides creates a vivid and compelling portrait of youth and lost innocence. He takes readers back to the elm-lined streets of suburbia in the '70s and introduces them to the men whose lives were forever changed as boys by their fierce, awkward obsession with five doomed sisters: brainy Therese, fastidious Mary, ascetic Bonnie, libertine Lux, and pale, saintly Cecilia, whose spectacular demise inaugurates "the year of the suicides".

When school hunk Trip Fontain convinces the beautiful but sheltered Lisbon sisters to go to the prom, the romantic fantasies of a group of neighborhood boys threaten to come true--until all are engulfed in a stunning chain of events that will change their lives forever.