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Generation A
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  • Published: 2 December 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448115297
  • Imprint: RH AudioGo
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 8 hr 38 min
  • Narrators: Drew Marquardt, Paddy Wallace, Anthony Barclay, Katie Burnett, Christopher Simpson, Sez Niederer
  • RRP: $19.99

Generation A

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Sept 2010
Audiobook
2 Dec 2011
Paperback
1 Dec 2010
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From the author of JPod and Generation X, the bestselling generational classic, comes a dazzling new work that reimagines the very act of reading and storytelling in a crazed digital world.

In the near future bees are extinct - until five unconnected individuals, in different parts of the wowrld, 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, and 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 defences 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.
  • Published: 2 December 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448115297
  • Imprint: RH AudioGo
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 8 hr 38 min
  • Narrators: Drew Marquardt, Paddy Wallace, Anthony Barclay, Katie Burnett, Christopher Simpson, Sez Niederer
  • RRP: $19.99
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About the author

Douglas Coupland

DOUGLAS COUPLAND is a Canadian writer, visual artist and designer. His first novel is the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, still celebrated for its biting humour and cultural relevancy thirty years since initial publication. He has published fourteen novels, two collections of short stories, eight nonfiction books. He has written and performed for England's Royal Shakespeare Company, is a columnist for The Financial Times of London and a frequent contributor to The New York Times. In 2000 Coupland amplified his visual art production and has recently had two separate museum retrospectives, Everything is Anything is Anywhere is Everywhere at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and Munich's Villa Stücke. In 2015 and 2016 Coupland was artist in residence in the Paris Google Cultural Institute. In May 2018, his exhibition on ecology, Vortex, opened at the Vancouver Aquarium. Coupland is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the Order of British Columbia, a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence.
portrait photo of Douglas Coupland

Also by Douglas Coupland

Binge
Bit Rot
Worst. Person. Ever.
Shopping in Jail
Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People
Player One
See all

Praise for Generation A

He is a brilliant social commentator and a wit of our times

Times Literary Supplement

'With this exceptional sequel to Generation X, Douglas Coupland may be one of the smartest, wittiest writers around...He is a terrifically good writer...Coupland scatters his smartly satirical observations throughout...This is a clever, brilliant book - and it's loads better than Generation X...funny and profound'

Esquire

'Possibly the most gifted exegete of North American mass culture writing today'

Observer

'Douglas Coupland has surely reserved his place at the top table of North American fiction'

Independent on Sunday

'We should really pay attention to Coupland. His eye is so firmly on the ball he's virtually clairvoyant'

Guardian

Eighteen years on from Generation X, Coupland still satirises pop culture better than anyone. This globe-spanning tale, set in the near future, is masterfully told and often hilarious.

GQ

Highly recommended. Like Murakami in thriller-trope mode. Go for it.

William Gibson

From the very first pages it jumps out: the language, the preoccupations, the political and technological references, the humour - they're all so now... Scintillating...I must admit I read the novel enviously. Oh, to have written something so clever, funny, heartfelt and original...The narration is layered, there are passages that are very funny, others that are wise, and throughout the language crackles with vitality...In the future, if people are curious about what it was like to live in our times, in the early 21st century, they will do well to read Douglas Coupland.

Yann Martell