The Virgin Suicides

　　This beautiful and sad first novel, recently adapted for a major motion picture, tells of a band of teenage sleuths who piece together the story of a twenty-year old family tragedy begun by the youngest daughter's spectacular demise by self-defenstration, which inaugurates 'the year of the suicides.'

　　Jeffrey Eugenides is a novelist. His first book, The Virgin Suicides, earned him comparisons to such writers as William Wharton and Alice McDermott. The book's first chapter, which describes a teenaged girl jumping out of a window and impaling herself on a fence, won the 1991 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Eugenides also received a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Eugenides was named by Granta magazine as one of the 20 best American novelists under forty.