A debut novel about how decisions reverberate through the generations.
Generation is a short novel that contains a huge amount. Narrated from different characters' points of view, with one taking up the thread from another when their part of the story has been told, the full course of the novel takes place over eighty years, three continents and three generations.
At its heart, though, is Aine, a recently-divorced woman in her 30s who wants some kind of escape from her life in Ireland: from her ex-husband and his pregnant girlfriend, her mundane job and unexciting love life. So she decides to try something completely different and, with her six-year-old daughter Daisy, goes to stay for six weeks on an organic farm near Chicago. The trip doesn't turn out how she imagined it would, and that summer will have unforeseeable consequences for everyone involved.
Ambitious, gripping and very well-written, Generation moves effortlessly from the smallest of details to the largest of canvases, as the repercussions of the decisions taken by parents play out in the lives of their children for years to come.