The Tesseract by Alex Garland

Alex Garland's international bestseller, The Beach, received extraordinary praise, and his writing was compared to Hemingway, Greene, Conrad, Golding, and Huxley. His new novel, The Tesseract, is a bold departure from The Beach, and demonstrates the enormous range of Garland's talent.

The Tesseract is a Chinese puzzle of a novel, beautifully written and suspensefully crafted. Set in the Philippines and spanning three generations, it follows three stories whose characters' fates are intertwined: gangsters on a chase through the streets of Manila; middle-class parents putting their children to bed in the suburbs; and a couple of street kids and the wealthy psychologist who is studying their dreams. It is a novel that balances science against religion, and our wills against our fates, asking the ever elusive question of where meaning lies.