New York, NY: Farrar Straus & Giroux (1993)

First Edition.

Fine in dust jacket. Image shows book in mylar protective cover.

The Virgin Suicides is unlike any other novel you will read this year - a haunting, tender, and wickedly funny tale of love and terror, memory and imagination, sex and suicide. It is told by a "collective" narrator whose wry, intelligent voice speaks for an eclectic band of teenage trespassers who once roamed the lawns and sidewalks of their placid suburban neighborhood like so many sleuths.

Their obsession: the mysterious Lisbons - brainy Therese (17), fastidious Mary (16), ascetic Bonnie (15), libertine Lux (14), and the youngest, pale, saintly Cecilia (13), whose spectacular demise by self-defenestration onto an iron fence inaugurates "the year of the suicides."

Now, nearly twenty years later, the narrator and his friends piece together fragments of gossip and hearsay, overheard phone conversations, police reports, newspaper clippings, and sultry, whispered confessions - all the gathered evidence that forms the tragic family romance of The Virgin Suicides. Why does Lux escape so thoroughly and courageously into promiscuous sex - on the roof of the house?

Why does Mr. Lisbon retreat like a monk into the dark, food-littered bunker of his locked home? What is the meaning of the candles lit at certain hours in Cecilia's cloistered, blackly shuttered windows? These and other tantalizing mysteries lie at the heart of Jeffrey Eugenide's unforgettable passionate song of yearning and youth.