Book description
The new novel from the bestselling author of Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides.
Brown University, 1982. Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English student and
incurable romantic, is writing her thesis on Jane Austen and George
Eliot - authors of the great marriage plots. As Madeleine studies the
age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two
very different men, intervenes.
Leonard Bankhead, brilliant scientist and charismatic loner, attracts
Madeleine with an intensity that she seems powerless to resist.
Meanwhile, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus, a theology student
searching for some kind of truth in life, is certain of at least one
thing - that he and Madeleine are destined to be together.
But as all three leave college, they will have to figure out how they
want their own marriage plot to end. 'If you were ever young and
thought you knew what you wanted, if you ever imagined that no one could
feel such intensity of emotion as you, if you ever had your dreams
dashed and your heart broken, then this is the book for you' The Times
'I adored The Marriage Plot … David Nicholls' One Day with George Eliot
thrown in' Erica Wagner, The Times, Books of the Year
'I gorged myself on The Marriage Plot' Geoff Dyer
'A marvellous, compulsive storyteller; he reminds us that while love
may not always triumph, it follows its own wayward course to the end'
Sunday Telegraph
'Where it excels is in pinpointing human emotions and in capturing the
giddy flux of young love. As Mitchell says, “There were some books that
reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak
only of the truest things.” Funny, poignant and insightful, this is one
of those books' Sebastian Shakespeare
'Immensely readable, funny and heartfelt, with instantly beguiling
writing that springs effortlessly back and forth over the year's events…
it was indeed worth waiting for' Daily Telegraph
'Utterly engrossing … so well depicted - with wit, care and charm -
that Eugenides hasn't just raised his game, he's changed the fictional
goalposts' Daily Mirror
'In the generosity and and nuance of his characters and paragraphs you
are reminded of the Jonathan Franzen of “The Corrections”' Observer
'Moving, human and challenging…subtle, pertinent narrative observations
that show the work of a master of fiction at work' Times Jeffrey
Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford
Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published in
1993 to great acclaim and he has received numerous awards for his work.
In 2003, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex,
which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award,
the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and France's Prix Medicis and has sold
more than 3 million copies.
