The main character in Middlesex is Cal Stephanides, a hermaphrodite who was raised as a girl until he was a teenager when it was discovered that he was genetically a boy. Cal decides that he will live between the genders and be “middlesex”. He discovered that his condition was caused by the inbreeding of his ancestors. Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel tells the family history and how sexual and cultural conditions led to Cal’s birth and how Cal lives as both and neither as a man and a woman. Eugenides writes a story of a main character who feels out of the mainstream of life and must find a place to fit in.

 Eugenides’ narrative spans 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s’ Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin.

Best seller Berg writes about Chicago in 1943 through the lives of three Irish-Catholic Heaney sisters. Kitty and Louise send their boyfriends off to fight in WWII and faithfully write two-page letters every day, while sister Tish writes to as many soldiers as she can. Observing the daily life of these girls as well as their parents and three brothers, we get a glimpse of what life was like on the home front and the sacrifices that were made. The lifelong consequences of the choices the Heaney sisters make reveal how powerful love and family can be

The four beautiful, cultured and clever daughters of the Count and Countess of Provence made illustrious marriages and lived at the very center of political power and intrigue in 13th-century Europe. Marguerite accompanied her husband, King Louis IX of France, on his disastrous first crusade to the Holy Land. With her sister Eleanor, queen of England who was married to Henry III  Marguerite made  a peace treaty between France and England.  Beatrice's coronation as queen of Sicily was the highest point of her long, hard-fought campaign to earn respect from her world-famous, mightily accomplished older siblings. Sanchia , queen of Germany, was wed to one of the richest men in Europe, but her reign only brought her misery.