Generation 14

“I am a fourteenth generation clone and something has gone wrong with me. Not that my DNA is altered, not that I am a mutant. Not that any function need be eliminated. It’s nothing obvious. It’s terminal, and secret. Let me put it this way: I remember.”

In a world where memory is forbidden and sexuality taboo, Clone 14/54/G is unique. Haunted by her past lives and caught in a struggle between the forces of oppression and those of liberty, language and love, she keeps a secret journal.

Set in the 24th century, the novel journeys back and forth across millennia to explore ideas of plural identity, and what it means to be human. This extraordinary novel is unlike any other coming from the subcontinent, and heralds a new generation of fantasy writing from India.

Intense, poetic, and erotic, Generation 14 is a serious and vivid reflection on repression and the fragility of freedoms, and a dazzlingly imaginative political satire.

“Priya Sarukkai Chabria is remarkable both as poet and novelist and her twin aspects are clearly evident in Generation 14, for while the book is, on the one hand, a piece of ambitious and inventive science-fiction about cloning and control, it is, also, most importantly, concerned with the poetry of belonging, selfhood and commitment. The scenes are vividly visualised and carried through at a convincing pace. Chabria depicts a violent world out of which revolutionary forces emerge out of history to round out a new world that is an echo of the lost, awakening the new to a deeper, more humane consciousness.” — George Szirtes, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize