Eugenides grew up in Detroit and studied at the University of Michigan, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel draws deeply on the Greek-American community of southeastern Michigan. The story follows three generations of a family from Smyrna to Detroit to the suburbs, with the narrator Cal Stephanides navigating questions of identity against a backdrop of twentieth-century Michigan history. The novel's Detroit sections capture the industrial rise and decline of the region with novelistic precision.
While not set in Ann Arbor specifically, Middlesex is essential reading for understanding the cultural landscape of the area — the immigrant communities, the auto industry's shadow, and the particular character of Michigan's university towns and working cities existing side by side.