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The idea is that the generation ship has broken down. After hundreds of years, most of the inhabitants have forgotten even that they are on a ship. They live nasty, brutish and short lives in the corridors of the ship, amid a tangle of hydroponics. Their emotional lives seem stunted; their physical lives dangerous. The viewpoint character is Roy Complain, a hunter of the tribe of Greene, who lives according to the brutal "Teachings," which valorize egotism and violence. Complain is recruited by a "priest" named Marapper to join a band of five people in a journey to "Forwards," the front of the ship (as the priest assures them it really is), to find the "control room." Their journey is full of incident: battles with evolved rats and with "Giants" and with the mysterious "outsiders"; discovery of the "swimming pool"; encounters with weightlessness. Eventually they find the comparatively civilized "Forwards" section. Then revelations start to move faster, spurred by the discovery of a diary from one of the original ship Captains. The climax is action-filled, leading to a final revelation that changes our entire understanding of the book.
The structure is typical of what Peter Nicholls in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia calls "conceptual breakthrough" stories. This one is impressive because Aldiss, knowing that the reader knows the fundamental element the main character doesn't know from the beginning, still manages a continuing series of surprises, an increasing sense of revelation, and manages to make the surprises and the ultimate "truth" thematically worthwhile.
For this edition Aldiss has made a number of minor revisions. As he writes:

"The adventure remains the same.... Only a few words have been changed. But of course words make all the difference."

I've checked out a few of the changes against my copy of the American edition (including a change in the very last sentence), and I think the changes are improvements which don't alter the fundamental feel of the book. Aldiss rings several clever changes on the general concept of the generation ship. The book is full of revelations, some expected by the experienced reader, some quite surprising. By and large, it's a worthwhile and original novel, though there are weaknesses. The opening sections, despite a fair amount of action, drag a bit. The closing sections move very quickly, but partly this movement is propelled by some plot silliness (a hard-to-believe, and late-introduced, love story, Complain getting accepted into Forwards society too easily, and some silly biology to drive the critical crisis that first caused the ship's problem, and which then leads to the moving final situation).
Still, in the context of 50s SF, the scientific silliness is pretty much par for the course, and it's used in the service of a striking and rather bitter conclusion. It's definitely early Aldiss, and by no means his best work, but Non-Stop is nonetheless worth reading, and quite a significant contribution to the long SF history of generation ship novels. 

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