(One of the most acclaimed thrillers of the year...

The "extraordinary"* national bestseller by the award-winning author of The Beach.

"Riveting...The Tesseract offers myriad secret pleasures beyond its seemingly plot-driven narrative of intrigue in the streets of Manila."-San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"The Tesseract has the traits of a thriller, but it's also a love story, a character study, a portrait of life among Manila's street kids, even an experiment in narration...a feverish, affecting, altogether captivating story....What really makes The Tesseract so gripping is the author's dazzling performance as a storyteller-not the bloody climaxes per se but the innovative techniques and deft changes of pace with which they are related. This is one of those rare novels that can be read for thrills but also taken apart and examined the way a jeweler does a fine watch. Garland also lavishes his characters with quirks that ring true, outbursts of human oddity that transform a moment that most authors would rush past into something memorable...all but flawless, a tour de force of brilliant narration and psychological acuity."-i>The Washington Post

"Virtuosic...cinematic, poetic, terrifyingly precise."-The New York Times Book Review

"Bristles with suspense...mature, intelligent, and rewarding."-People

"[A] swift psychological thriller...beautifully rendered."-Spin

"Powerful, exotic...unfold[s] like a corrupt and mysterious flower."-J.G. Ballard

"Thoroughly assured...violently entertaining."-Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"A steam engine of a narrative."-Newsweek

"Reminiscent of Graham Greene."-The New Yorker

"Delivers tremendous speed and style."-Dallas Morning News

"A dangerously hot novel."-The Christian Science Monitor

"Inventive and compelling."-Los Angeles Times

"A dashing tour de force."-St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Richly emotional."-Harper's Bazaar

"[A] page-turner."-Time Out New York

In The Tesseract, set in muggy, scary Manila, Alex Garland again proves himself the past master of the youth paranoia novel. His first novel, The Beach--a tale of Western tourists on a druggy Thai isle--was dubbed a Gen-X Lord of the Flies. It made him Britain's richest 28-year-old writer even before Leonardo DiCaprio starred in the movie version. Now Garland ups the literary ante with an intricate three-part crime-story structure that several critics have compared to Pulp Fiction (only without the jokes). It's hard-boiled yet lyrical, subtle yet simple. Garland has three sets of characters collide, as if in a devilishly devised model-train wreck involving real trains, and his Manila is more grittily realistic than his Thailand. The first protagonist is Sean, an English seafaring lad who's about to meet the gangster Don Pepe, who's upset because Sean's boss recently missed a protection payment. It's not just the tarmac-melting heat that accounts for Sean's sweaty state of mind. As Don Pepe's posse's footsteps get louder outside his room, Sean glimpses his face in the mirror "in a state of flux. Unable to resolve itself, like a cheap hologram or a bucket of snakes, the lips curled while the jaw relaxed.... Fear, Sean thought distantly. Rare that one got to see what it actually looked like." Garland's great gift is conveying such mental states with the economy and grace of a Muhammad Ali punch. One feels that Don Pepe is about to reach up from the book and do violence to the reader.

Next comes the entire, tensely compressed life story of Rosa, a rural beach beauty turned big-city physician. Rosa is tormented by memories of her first love at 16, a man who comes crashing back into her life. In the last section, Sean and Don Pepe's thugs literally crash into her life, along with the book's third star duo, tough street kids Cente and Totoy. The Tesseract's vivid images and breakneck chases make it unsurprising to learn that Garland started out as a comic-book author, though his second novel really bears comparison with Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers. --Tim Appelo

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