Generation 8
Available in paperback and e-book
Re-connect with nature, with the past and with hope for our future…
Is it too late to turn back the clock and re-connect with the very nature we’re destroying? Most eco-fiction would hope to scare you onto the right path, but in Heather Comina’s debut novel, Generation 8, the message is a more positive one of possibility with which she hopes to inspire readers.
What if the trees could tell us secrets that could save our future?
Lilly’s life is turned upside down when the global pandemic hits. In one sweep, she loses her job as an airline steward and is forced to move to rural Oxfordshire and live on her grandparents’ farm. From flying high to living low, she spends her days trying to forget and her nights haunted by dark dreams where old Ma Hakka leads her to the depths of despair. Her first thought is to keep the strangely disturbing nightmares to herself, but as they mount, the desire to share is overwhelming.
During a group therapy session, she discovers that she is not the only one to experience such dreams. With the help of her newfound ally, Margaret, Lilly uncovers a series of dream accounts spanning seven generations which ultimately reveals the source of her dream – the Signal Tree. As her understanding of local history unfolds and her knowledge of how trees cast old lessons within the patterns of their wood, she is able to experience things through a new, longer-term, tree perspective.
Can this new knowledge help her to re-learn the ancestral ways and, together with family and friends, create a path to a better future for the next generation – Generation 8?
Generation 8
Available as Paperback and e-book from Matador
Heather Comina is a freelance climate & sustainability consultant. In 2018 she founded Climate Concepts. Generation 8 is her first novel.
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What people are saying…
Excellent book. A positive story of support friendship, hope and community spirit through tough times.
Veronica Paget
Very readabale. Very relatable. A story that makes you reflect on how humanity has effected nature and our living world over the generations. A thought provoking and warming book. Highly recommend this book.
We forget sometimes that human generations are 25-30 years whereas trees – in particular the Signal Tree, the Black Poplar at the heart of this story – are 150-200. Shifting baselines mean that our experience of loss and disconnection in relation to nature are related to our own experiences so we don’t witness the level of deterioration in our own generation and don’t act as we should. Generation 8 is a metaphor for hope and possibility once we open our eyes to the myriad ways for humans to connect with nature and to think long term in the interests of future generations. …And it’s a really good story, with lively, sympathetic characters who you will remember long after you’ve put the book down. Read it!
Jane Davidson, author of ‘#Futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country’, Chelsea Green 2020
Generation 8 