It’s been nine years since Eugenides’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex hit the shelves, so his highly anticipated new novel arrives much-hyped and with expectations set high.

The Marriage Plot doesn’t possess Middlesex’s ambitious scope and gets off to a (somewhat) slow start, but Eugenides still knows how to write a gorgeous line and his characters are ridiculously appealing. There’s an unrequited-love triangle at the heart of this story, and mental illness, and religious passion – as well as a love of literature, and the kind of power that results from characters awakening to their defects and their unique beauty. Eugenides’ characters navigate their trials, their elations, their disappointments and the tricky entanglements of love and disappointment with grace and resilience. Eugenides somehow manages to resolve their triangle in a satisfactory and surprising way, while tying the thematic elements of the story together.