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 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.