Description
Discover Jeffrey Eugenides’ brilliant, haunting debut novel—a modern American classic that was adapted into the iconic, critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola. The Virgin Suicides is a masterfully written psychological portrait of memory, youth, and the suffocating isolation of midcentury suburbia.
The shocking thing about the five Lisbon sisters—Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese—was how nearly normal they seemed when their strict, overprotective mother finally let them out for the one and only date of their lives. Beautiful, eccentric, and entirely out of reach, the girls become the obsession of a group of neighborhood boys who watch them from afar.
Twenty years later, the girls’ enigmatic personalities remain permanently embalmed in the memories of those same boys, now grown men, who piece together medical reports, diary entries, and physical artifacts to reconstruct their shared adolescence. They vividly recall the heavy contradictions of the Lisbon household—the provocative image of a brassiere draped carelessly over a crucifix belonging to the rebellious Lux; the sisters’ breathtaking, ethereal appearance on the night of the high school dance; and the sultry, sleepy Michigan street across which they helplessly watched a family disintegrate and fragile lives completely disappear.
Written in a rare and mesmerizing collective first-person perspective (“we”), Jeffrey Eugenides weaves a dark, poetic, and deeply melancholic fable about the elusive nature of youth and the mysteries of the human heart. It remains a definitive masterpiece of contemporary fiction.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.