Generation A

From the author of JPod and Generation X, the bestselling generational classic, comes a dazzling new work that re-imagines the very act of reading and storytelling in a crazed digital world. In the near future bees are extinct - until one autumn when five unconnected individuals, in America, New Zealand, France, Canada and Sri Lanka, are stung. Immediately snatched up by ominous figures in hazmat suits, interrogated separately in neutral Ikea-like chambers, and then released as 15-minute-celebrities into a world driven almost entirely by the internet, these five unforgettable people endure a barrage of unusual and highly 21st-century circumstances. A charismatic scientist with dubious motives eventually brings the quintet together on a remote Canadian island. But their shared experience unites them in a way they could never have imagined. Generation A mirrors the structure of 1991’s Generation X as it champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defenses we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world. Like much of Coupland’s writing, it occupies the perplexing hinterland between optimism about the future and everyday, apocalyptic paranoia, and is his most ambitious and entertaining novel to date.