Born in London in 1970, Alex Garland published his first novel, The Beach, when he was 26. Set among a group of backpackers in Southeast Asia, The Beach is a fast-paced and suspenseful thriller that has been called the first serious Generation X novel. Like The Lord of the Flies, to which it has sometimes been compared, The Beach deals with a dark side of humanity, revealed when the characters find themselves set apart from civilization.
Garland's second novel, The Tesseract, was published in 1998 and is also set in Southeast Asia, this time in the Philippines. The Tesseract follows the lives of several different characters during one night in Manila, with the different stories all coming together to meet in an explosive ending.
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