Jeffrey Eugenides 'The Virgin Suicides' | Home

With startling immediacy and dark, deadpan humor, the collective narrator of The Virgin Suicides tells a story in a voice that speaks for an eclectic group of men who once stalked life's secrets on the lawns and sidewalks of an affluent American suburb in the seventies...men whose lives have been forever changed by their fierce, awkward obsession with the five doomed Lisbon sisters: brainy Therese, fastidious Mary, ascetic Bonnie, libertine Lux, and pale, saintly Cecilia whose spectacular demise inaugurates "the year of the suicides."

Juxtaposing the most common and the most gothic, the humorous and the tragic, author Jeffrey Eugenides creates a vivid and compelling portrait of youth and lost innocence. He takes the reader back to the elm-lined streets of middle-class America, to the sights, the smells, and sensations of backyards and schoolyards filled with wonder and mystery. This is the debut novel that caused a sensation and won immediate acclaim from critics and colleagues—a tender, wickedly funny tale of love and terror, sex and suicide, memory and imagination that no reader will soon forget.