ALL THE DAUGHTERS SING

All the Daughters Sing by Jan Priddy, ISBN 979-8-234-11410-5

Every day the news shows us war, poverty, and disease; people growing angrier and more frightened. Who taught us to believe this conflict is inevitable and even necessary to human life on Earth?

Turn it off… and turn it on again.

In 2054, First Nations engineering student Gena rises from her sickbed in Seattle to discover that every other person and animal in Seattle has died. She struggles to survive alone until a dozen years later she inexplicably begins birthing peculiar daughters. Gena herself has changed, become healthier and strong. She lives another century and never sleeps again. 

By the time her daughters are grandmothers, Gena discovers she’s not alone. African American Tula, Brazilian surgeon Chava, elderly Delia in Wales, young student Yun in Korea, and civil servant Chielo in Nigeria are among those survivors. These women in Asia, Africa, and the Americas share their own stories of peculiar daughters exactly like hers. These new generations are curious, cooperative, and kind.

This radical imagined future steps away from what Ursula K. Le Guin warned is “the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live.” Maybe the world would be better if we were mostly gone.

ALL THE DAUGHTERS SING will be released August 2026, in a limited edition of 100 copies.

To preorder, send your address, $20.00 + $5 for US shipping to Jan Priddy, P.O. Box 1442, Cannon Beach, OR 97110. You may pay via check or use Venmo (email me for the other number you might need). Outside the U.S., please email me for a shipping estimate: andpride@gmail.com

Dystopian novels predictably follow a cultural or technical flaw to its most horrific potential, with people struggling to regain what’s been lost. My novel, ALL THE DAUGHTERS SING, does something different by discovering an altered humanity after the fall. Not just sorry, changed. The goal, when I began in 2018, was not to regain the Garden, but to create a new one.

In the tradition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I imagine a world of and for women. A peaceful world where competition and conflict have given way to collaboration and kindness.

Survival of the fittest demands a fight for mates, food, and shelter. I learned that from multiple sources growing up, including every biology, anthropology, and psychology course. It’s a cliche that competition is required for survival. We’re taught that success might be defined in a personal way, but it’s always about winning. And winning is measured in treasure and triumph over others, in others’ loss. I wondered, what if none of that were true? What if collaboration were more efficient than combat? Surely that is another true thing. Working together breeds collective success. Imagine that instead of approaching life as competitive sport with winners and losers, we participated in life as members of a choir where we made a joyful song. What might we become as a species?

From a time of climate change, disease, war, and assumptions about capitalism, competition, and violence, this novel tears down the world in order to create a different, perhaps a better one in the near future. ALL THE DAUGHTERS SING offers a poignant story of loss and hope by those who start it, but are not quite of it.

In 2054, life on Earth resets itself—turned off and turned on again.