"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960 and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petovsky, Michigan, in August of 1974."

So opens the story of the hermaphrodite Calliope Stephanides, inheritor of a rare genetic condition that has followed her grandparents to the US from the ruins of the Ottoman empire. The novel follows three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus to Prohibition era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of 1967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Point, Michigan. Part family saga, part coming-of-age tale, it is also is also the genetically tangled story of America itself.