Children of a Future Age tells the tale of a group marriage and the children who grew up in it. The story opens in present-day Pleasant Valley, California when a surprise encounter leads pediatric cardiologist Adrienne Eisenberg to revisit the events that plunged her family into turmoil thirty years before. Her inquiries take us to 1971 where we find Adrienne’s parents stifling in the roles to which their middle-class upbringing has confined them. When they meet another frustrated couple, a door suddenly flies open. Hand-in-hand, the four can chase all their dreams – careers and college for women sick of housekeeping, a life in the country for men trapped in city jobs. But the children of the two families are as discomfited as their parents are exhilarated by this foray into group marriage. Gradually it becomes clear that all must pay penalties for breaking a thousand years of social conventions. Three decades later, as Adrienne picks up the tale, events in her own life suddenly make urgent her investigation.
Praise for Children of a Future Age
“Laird Harrison has captured both the ardent optimism and the giddy naivete
of an era when anything seemed possible, even a new definition of love.”
- Dashka Slater, author of The Wishing Box (Chronicle 2000) which the Los Angeles Times chose as one of the best books of 2000.
“In his astonishing novel, Children of a Future Age, Laird Harrison strips the rosy veils from the heads of the flower children and shows the hippies for what they were. Children of a Future Age not only reveals the middle class’s angst, but the unacknowledged and permanently damaged victims of the ‘60s—not the flower children, but their children. With a clear and unsentimental eye, and in flawless sharp-edged prose, Harrison gives us a modern-day Blithedale Romance.”
- Eric Miles Williamson, author of East Bay Grease (Picador 1999); board member, National Book Critics Circle; editor, American Book Review.
“The key to the current confusion about relationships and marriage lies deeper in the past than the sixties and seventies, but that’s when experimentation went mainstream and caught middle-class Americans in its hazardous flow. Laird Harrison’s characters aren’t big-city bohemians or college students made heady with sudden independence but softball-playing suburban moms and dads with adolescent children in tow. Written with grace, humor, intelligence, and an inspiring affection for human nature, Children of a Future Age deftly examines the history of two couples and four children in one turbulent household of the past, as well as the present life of one of the daughters grown to adulthood and yearning to save her own marriage.”
- Anastasia Hobbet, author of The Pleasure of Believing (Soho 1997)
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Read a sample chapter of Children of a Future Age
Contact the author: lairdharrison@gmail.com
