Madeleine Hanna was the dutiful English major who didn’t get the memo.
While everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, she was happily absorbed with Jane Austen and George Eliot. Madeleine was the girl who dressed a little too nicely for the taste of her more Bohemian friends, the perfect girlfriend whose college love life, despite her good looks, hadn’t lived up to expectations.
But now, in the spring of her final year, Madeleine has enrolled in a semiotics course ‘to see what all the fuss is about’. And, for reasons that have nothing to do with her studies, life and literature will never be the same. Not after she falls in love with Leonard Morten - charismatic loner and college Darwinist - who is possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and introduces her to the ecstasies of immediate experience. And certainly not after Mitchell Grammaticus - devotee of Patti Smith and Thomas Merton - resurfaces in her life, obsessed with the idea that she will be his wife.
The triangle at the heart of this novel is at once age-old and completely fresh and surprising. With brilliant wit, irony and an incredible understanding of and love for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides captures the original energies of the novel while creating a story so contemporary that it reads like an intimate journal of our own lives.
About the Author
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.
Industry Reviews
'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
