Middlesex

Three generations of a Greek American family, told by Cal Stephanides, run from a burning city on the Aegean to the assembly lines and streets of Detroit. The map holds the east-side Greek quarter where the grandparents land, the boulevard where the city caught fire in 1967, and the quiet modernist house out in Grosse Pointe where the family finally lands.

Cal Stephanides

The quay at Smyrna

Book One

Before Detroit there is the sea. The saga begins with the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, when the Greek population fled the burning waterfront and the narrator's grandparents boarded a ship toward America. The city is now Izmir; the harbour promenade is the seam where the family's crossing starts.

Book One

explicit Smyrna is named in the novel; this marks the waterfront of the old city, today's Izmir on the Turkish Aegean, where the 1922 catastrophe played out.

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