Generation A is the thirteenth novel from Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland. It is dedicated to Anne Collins and takes place in a near future, in a world in which bees have become extinct. The novel is told with a shifting-frame narrative perspective, shifting between the novel's five main protagonists. The novel mirrors the style of Coupland's first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which is also a framed narrative. On September 30, 2009, Generation A was announced as a finalist for The Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize by The Writer's Trust of Canada.

Synopsis

Coupland's website has a synopsis of the novel: ""In the near future bees are extinct—until one autumn when five unconnected individuals, in Iowa, New Zealand, Paris, Ontario, 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 on Coupland.com

Characters

Style

The novel "mirrors the style" of Coupland's breakthrough first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture The story is told through non-numbered chapters, just as the first was. The book is told with a shifting narrative perspective. Each chapter title announces whose perspective the rest of the chapter will be in. The book rotates in the order of Harj, Zack, Samantha, Julien, and Diana for most of the work. Some changes happen due to the plot. The novel is also, like Generation X, a framed narrative. However, as this novel mirrors the style, the framed narrative style is also reflected. The first novel has stories in a frame, where the stories are the important part of the tale. In this novel, the stories help to bring out the characters. Throughout the novel, the importance of stories in a person's life is discussed, and in this novel, the stories are important only so much as they bring out and expand on the character's stories.

Title

The title is also a reference to Coupland's first novel, and it comes from a quote by Kurt Vonnegut. It is listed in an epigraph: ""Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago.""

• Kurt Vonnegut Syracuse University commencement address May 8, 1994