Jeffrey Eugenides

Eugenides grew up in Detroit in a Greek American family, and his 1993 debut watches five sisters in a Michigan suburb through the eyes of the neighbourhood boys who narrate the whole thing decades afterwards without ever having understood it. Sofia Coppola filmed it in 1999. Middlesex took the Pulitzer in 2003 and is narrated by Cal, an intersex man tracing a recessive gene from a village above Smyrna, through his grandparents' flight in 1922, to a Detroit assembly line. The Marriage Plot puts three graduates into a love triangle shaped by the semiotics they had just been taught. He teaches at Princeton and writes slowly.