A suspenseful, intricately woven novel that follows the interlocking fates of three sets of characters in the Philippines: gangsters in a chase through the streets of Manila; a middle-class mother putting her children to bed in the suburbs and remembering her first love; and a couple of street kids and the wealthy psychiatrist who is studying their dreams. Alex Garland demonstrates the range of his extraordinary talents as a novelist in this Chinese puzzle of a novel about three intersecting sets of characters in the Philippines.

"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." --The Washington Post

"Virtuosic" --The New York Times Book Review

"THE TESSERACT feels.... like a Quentin Tarantino or John Woo movie, seasoned with some Graham Greene.  It is as thoroughly assured a performance as T and just as violently entertaining.  Taut, nervous and often bloody, THE  TESSERACT is a more experimental work than The Beach: elliptical and Rashomon–like in structure, where The Beach  was linear, cinematic in its effects, where The Beach was more conventionally literary. . . .  Mr. Garland not only does a completely convincing job of sketching in these characters’ lives in a series of quick, deftly drawn strokes, but he also fluently cuts back and forth between their stories, building suspense the way a film editor does, even as he is tying his disparate heroes’ tales together with dozens of overlapping motifs. . . .  As he demonstrated in The Beach, Mr. Garland is a natural at orchestrating violent set pieces with deadpan panache, but he also proves in this novel that he can create odd, oddly sympathetic people with unexpected inner lives. . . . the novel’s suspense [has] a human cost and caculation...Garland is...persuasive a storyteller...gifted a writer...He has written a powerful if flawed novel, a novel that...reconfirms his prodigious and diverse talents.” --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review

“[C]omplex and intriguing...subtle fiction [that] has nothing to do with the higher math and a lot to do with good old-fashioned storytelling about big, old-fashioned themes—the mysteries of love and violence and death, the strange workings of fate. . . .  THE TESSERACT marks a significant departure from, and growth since, The Beach...Like a tesseract, it is composed of three dimensions that, in the end, inevitably imply a larger and more significant fourth. . .  The book is so cunningly constructed that you can’t discuss any of these three narratives in too much detail without giving away the connections. Suffice it to say that each story is delicately observed and ingeniously linked to the others. . . .  I’m fairly sure that this book, like its author, is the thing itself.”  --Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Observer

“Garland is a gifted storyteller whose use of language is reminiscent of Graham Greene’s.  His ambitious second novel is like the charm carried by one of its characters: at once consoling and intoxicatingly alien.” --The New Yorker

“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.  Not that the reader ever loses the thread of action (or at least not for long)—this fiction is not experimental with a capital E; but Garland likes to employ literary variations on such filmmaking techniques as freeze-frame, slow-mo and reshooting a scene from an altered perspective.  The result is a feverish, affecting, altogether captivating story packed into fewer than 300 pages. .  .  riveting  . . . [W]hat 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....THE TESSERACT strikes me as all but flawless, a tour de force of brilliant narration and psychological acuity.”  --The Washington Post

“[S]andwiched between the mayhem with which the novel begins and ends is a richly emotional narrative.  A woman mourns a lost romance, a psychologist befriends a street kid.  Garland lends a surprising lyricism to these ordinary Filipino lives.”                --Harper’s Bazaar

“From the first page to the last, Garland’s fine writing . . . make[s] THE TESSERACT a delightful novel.  Sean, Rosa, Cente, and a half-dozen other figures emerge with startling authenticity and life. . . .His young girls and old men, boys and grandmothers, are beautifully rendered.  The Philippines open up before us, through Garland’s imaginative labors, in a linguistic and historic abundance.  Like Graham Greene, Alex Garland takes familiar stories—the murder thriller, the tragic romance, the orphan’s wanderings—and spins them into explosive political fiction.  Perhaps the novel’s fourth dimension is Garland’s own insight into the Philippines, an island country about which he writes angrily, intimately, and lovingly.”  --Boston Globe

“The tales converge in a climax that will leave you shocked by the carnage but impressed with the author’s skill. Garland also wants to ponder big issues, like why some people suffer terrible fates.  The metaphysical musings would be distracting if they weren’t wrapped into such a steam engine of a narrative.  [I]t exerts the same unsettling grip on your imagination [as THE BEACH].”  --Newsweek

“Alex Garland works words the way a spider spins webs.  Interweaving disparate story lines, he builds suspenseful narrative tapestries out of seemingly unrelated events....An expertly hewn page-turner....gripping, well-written novel...fiercely cerebral.”  --Time Out New York

“Garland remains a writer to watch.”  --USA Today

“British wunderkind Alex Garland crafts a novel that bristles with suspense. . .Garland’s skill at creating tension keeps the novel driving forward with the force of a thriller...[P]roves that Garland’s first wave of success was no fluke....mature, intelligent and rewarding.”  --People

“Extraordinary and riveting...THE TESSERACT offers myriad secret pleasures beyond its seemingly plot-driven narrative of intrigue in the streets of Manila... provocatively complex ...Garland lures us into a world where logic is turned on its ear and coincidence is simply how life is.  In Garland’s world, as with Graham Greene’s, good and evil are rarely just that...A century ago another English writer, Thomas Hardy, created novels where coincidence played a significant role in his characters’ lives to show that man can never escape a preordained fate.  Garland goes him one better, suggesting that destiny is preordained not by some universal force but rather by linked events and individual perception of existence.  Only when a life is fully unfolded can we see the flaws in our perception; beforehand, the fourth dimension of existence remains a mystery.”                                                                                                                       --San Francisco Chronicle

“Garland has a gift for moving the action along . . . In the end, all three stories tuck into one another, culminating in a tense, bloody climax.”  --Salon

“In Alex Garland’s new novel, THE TESSERACT, the monsters are entirely human, but the tension is out of this world.   Garland is a wizard of time manipulation...What’s remarkable about THE TESSERACT is the way it traces the people and events that converge in the center of this deadly web...the complexity here is fascinating rather than baffling....This is a novel based on the physics of disaster....THE TESSERACT confirms all the praise poured on this English writer’s first novel, The Beach. Garland is a master at capturing that elastic moment before tragedy rips through the surface of ordinary life.  Even in moments of explosion, he catches every contradictory thought of terror and compassion.  This is a dangerously hot novel.”       --The Christian Science Monitor

“Inventive and compelling.  [Garland’s] brain beats with the energy of ideas and the courage to bridge the big questions."          --Los Angeles Times

“[L]ike Greene he creates atmosphere, and specifically an atmosphere of foreign political intrigue and violence that grabs you and keeps you...”  --Elle

“[E]xciting...Garland has given us an existential thriller, a suspense story but with a cosmic twist.  In a fictional genre in which so many fail, this is a rare and valuable achievement.”  --(New Jersey) Sunday Star Ledger

“One of the most structurally complex noir novels ever written.”  --Booklist

“[A] swift psychological thriller. . with Garland’s sharp, beautifully rendered stills. . .. a novel high on skill.”  --Spin

“In this intriguing and intricate novel set in the outskirts of Manila, Garland attempts to unravel the threads that have brought together in a bloody climax three totally dissimilar sets of individuals . . . Fastpaced, suspenseful, and thought-provoking, this is top-drawer fiction and highly recommended for public and academic collections.”  --Library Journal (starred)

“Alex Garland’s knuckle-biting debut, The Beach, was hailed as a fiendishly modern thriller with its hip allusions to Nintendo, kung-fu videos and dope.  Actually it was an old-fashioned adventure yarn about a dead man’s map, an astonishingly powerful drama of extremity and isolation....THE TESSERACT is a much more challenging successor.  It borrows from Graham Greene and the wayward fantasy of J.G. Ballard, as well as film.  . . .  Garland’s editing is super-slick. . . . he writes superbly about Manila’s jeepney traffic, streets and urchins . . .  fast-paced action . . . elegant prose. THE TESSERACT is a zingy, superbly crafted entertainment.”  --The Evening Standard

“Bravura storytelling . . .   Ambitious . . . Garland is an adept conjuror of unfamiliar worlds . . . A tense, jittery but oddly consoling read, THE TESSERACT proves defiantly that he’s also far from a one-hit wonder.” --Time Out

“An extraordinarily powerful and immensely literate book . . .  And it borders perilously close to the edge of brilliant. . . .  Garland . . . writes with a composure and a confidence well beyond his years.  Here we have a profoundly intelligent and beautifully complex tale of human emotion: of the error of coincidence; of the fickleness of fate; of the lottery of survival.  . . .  mesmerizing and mysterious . .  .  Bolder; infinitely more experimental and, thus, more challenging [than THE BEACH].  And it works."  --The Herald (Glasgow)

“Laden with tension . . .   moments of surprising sweetness . . .”  --Times Literary Supplement

“We’re still in parts foreign, and Garland’s still writing a blue streak.  This new novel is told as stylishly as its predecessor, but is more ambitious and less straightforward . . .  His exotic locations and metaphysical preoccupations have led Garland to be compared with Graham Greene.  His cold eye and menaced sense of the sheer strangeness of the world bring him just as close to J.G. Ballard...THE TESSERACT is as spooky and compelling as it is thoughtful.”  --The Observer

“A vivid and highly entertaining book that promises even greater fireworks for its young author.”  --Sunday Times

“The book is perfectly paced and put-together.”  --Independent on Sunday

“A brave, ambitious novel which proves that Garland is an important writer capable of great sensitivity and intelligence.”  --The Times

“If The Beach...was the literary equivalent of a Gameboy, THE TESSERACT is more of a Rubiks cube . . .  The year-off generation has lost a hero, but the literary world has gained a brilliant new talent.”  --Daily Mirror

“The work of a mature, sophisticated professional.   He has a stronger eye for detail; his characterization is more subtle, his approach to structure markedly more ambitious.”  --Daily Mail