Shampoo Planet: Douglas Coupland

Here is the rich and dazzling point where two worlds collide: those of 1960s parents and their 1990s offspring, ‘Golobal Teens.’ Raised in a hippie commune, Tyler Johnson is an ambitious twenty-year-old Reagan youth, living in a decaying northwest city and aspiring to a career with the corporation whose offices his mother once fire-bombed. It’s a six month chronicle of Tyler’s life that takes the reader to Paris and the ongoing party beside Jim Morrison’s grave, then to a wild island in British Columbia, the freak-filled redwood forests of northern California, a cheesy Hollywood, ultramodern Seattle and finally back home. On the way, a constellation of characters: Jasmine, Tyler’s Woodstock mum; Dan, his land-developer stepfather; Tyler’s summer fling ‘Princess Stephanie’; Anna-Louise, his post-feminist girlfriend with an eating disorder; Neil, Tyler’s Deadhead dope-ranching biological father...and Harmony, a rich computer hacker with a fetish for the medieval.