The Tesseract

Alex Garland’s national (and international) bestseller, The Beach, received extraordinary praise here and throughout Europe and was the winner of Britain’s prestigious Betty Trask Award. Reviewers compared Garland to Hemingway, Conrad, Golding, and Huxley, among others. The Washington Post called The Beach “a book that moves with the kind of speed and grace many older writers can only day-dream about.” His new novel, The Tesseract, is a bold departure from The Beach, and it demonstrates the enormous range of Garland’s talents.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.The Tesseract is a complex, mature, and compassionate novel by an unusually gifted young writer who continues to astonish us with the scope of his vision and his understanding of human nature. With The Tesseract, Garland fulfills the prediction Kazuo Ishiguro made last year: “The Beach will be remembered down the years as our first glimpse of a huge literary talent.”