Which novel by Jeffrey Eugenides won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003? The answer is Middlesex.
Middlesex, published in 2002, is a multigenerational family saga narrated by Cal Stephanides, an intersex person looking back on the family’s Greek-American history. The story moves from the Ottoman Empire and Greece to Detroit, tracing migration, assimilation, secrecy, and identity across generations.
The novel won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for books published during the preceding year. Its title refers both to Middlesex County, Michigan, and to the narrator’s experience of living beyond conventional gender binaries.
Readers sometimes confuse Eugenides’s Pulitzer winner with his earlier novel The Virgin Suicides, published in 1993 and later adapted into a 1999 film. The Marriage Plot appeared in 2011 and was not a Pulitzer winner; Fresh Complaint is a short-story collection published in 2017.