Douglas Coupland - Generation A

I'll save you some time, 7.30 Report researchers and lazy newspaper columnists looking for a tight five on The Kids: Generation A has nothing on why The Kids have no attention spans or why employers are bemoaning their have-it-all attitudes. The fact that it opens with a quote from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut Jr should give it away: this is a sci-fi novel in disguise, taking in environmental change, individualism vs community, drugs, online communication, international politics, neurobiology, corporatisation and a dozen other big ideas, all told in an astonishingly readable and straightforward manner in six first-person narratives (and the echoes of Faulkner's pioneering modernist novel As I Lay Dying are probably deliberate). Set in the immediate future, five people in different places around the world are stung by bees - which have been extinct for the last decade - which triggers a chain of events that intertwine to an ending that you'll think you see coming, and then be completely wrongfooted by. In that, it has more than a little in common with Vonnegut (especially later period work like Galapagos) and even if the ending seems a mite rushed, it does nothing to diminish its visceral kick.

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