Paramount Television Studios has acquired the television rights to the book Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides in a competitive situation, the trade publication Variety said it had learned exclusively.

The book won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003 and had been in the works to be a series on HBO in 2009 but has been sidelined since despite its acclaim as a best-seller, with more than four million copies bought.

The story follows Calliope ‘Cal’ Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family as they travel from their tiny village to Prohibition-era Detroit, eventually witnessing the race riots of 1967 before moving out to suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Cal discovers that he is intersex, tracing his transformation to a genetic condition that runs through the family, a term describing conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that’s neither male nor female.

Eugenides was born in Detroit to a Greek father and mother of English and Irish descent. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as two other novels, The Marriage Plot and The Virgin Suicides, which was the basis of a feature film.