The Virgin Suicides

Haunting and brilliant.

This book was beautifully written. It is a depressing subject but such a page-turner. I could not put it down. 

Since my "coming of age" was also around this time, it made it that much more intriguing (and I went to Detroit for the first time this year). 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

That Jeffrey Eugenides has made something magical and rare out of subject matter on the one hand so sensational—a quintet of suicides all in the same family, all in the same year—and so banal—coming of age in a suburb of Detroit in the 1970s (complete with soundtrack by Jim Croce, Bread, Carole King, and their contemporaries)—is a source of lasting wonder. The story is told by a collective narrator, a “we” who speaks for a group of boys who, as adolescents, are besotted with the mystifying Lisbon sisters, and, as adults, have remained transfixed by memories of the girls’ mysterious lives and unfortunate ends. Summoning a voice that embodies with expressive exactitude a quality of growing up that has slipped through the sentences of most novels concerned with it, Eugenides captures its nature as a communal experience with breathtaking, heartbreaking sympathy.