Creating a provocative sensation upon its publication in 1993 with a film adaptation that became a cult classic just six years later, The Virgin Suicides remains a persistent contemporary classic; a novel at once remarkably elusive, open to perpetual interpretation, and yet with an intensely personal resonance for many readers. It was the debut novel of author Jeffrey Eugenides (winning awards even before its publication), and in many ways it lays the groundwork for the mastery and peculiarity of a seminal artist. The story, of course, is that of the Lisbon sisters – Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia, who range in ages from 17 to 13, respectively – and the year in which they ended their young lives. In a uniquely stylized first-person-plural narrative the unidentified boys across the street, telling the story twenty years later, explore every waking moment of their obsession with the otherworldly Lisbon sisters: beginning with young Cecilia’s first suicide attempt and subsequent completion, and carrying on fixatedly through until the sisters’ tragic dénouement. In between lies an electric, compelling portrait of a doomed search for liberation in the clutch of youthful desperation; of parental extremes warring with teenage angst; and of the grimy secrets hiding in the shadows of 1970s suburbia.