Alex Garland

Richard lands in East Asia in search of an earthly utopia. In Thailand, he is given a map promising an unknown island, a secluded beach - and a new way of life. What Richard finds when he gets there is breathtaking: more extraordinary, more frightening than his wildest dreams. But how long can paradise survive here on Earth? This is a classic story of paradise found - and lost. Richard lands in East Asia in search of an earthly utopia. In Thailand, he is given a map promising an unknown island, a secluded beach - and a new way of life. What Richard finds when he gets there is breathtaking: more extraordinary, more frightening than his wildest dreams. But how long can paradise survive here on Earth? And what lengths will Richard go to in order to save it?

Contemporary / British English (Available June 2008) 'Close your eyes … imagine idyllic white sands and coral gardens.' Richard arrives in Thailand. He hears about 'the beach', a secret island. It is paradise on earth. He goes there, but paradise soon turns into hell…

Late at night in a seedy hotel, Richard is drawn into a strange conversation with a fellow guest. Through a narrow strip of mosquito netting he hears for the first time of a secret beach, and island Garden of Eden hidden somewhere in the scattered islands of a Thai marine park. The next morning, Richard finds a map pinned to his door, and the man who put it there has slashed his wrists. The challenge is irresistible, and Richard sets off on a perilous journey in search of Shangri-La.

Carl is brutally assaulted in an underground train while protecting a young woman from a gang of thugs. Beaten unconscious he lies for days in a hospital bed - but appears to make a full recovery. On discharge from hospital Carl picks up the threads of his daily life, visiting friends, seeing his girlfriend - until he starts to notice strange leaps in time, distortions in his experience. Is he truly interacting with the outside world, or could he still be in the coma? So begins a dark pschological drama of the unconscious that raises profound questions about the boundary between the real and the imagined. In the latest novel by the bestselling author of the Generation X thriller The Beach, a young man who fell into a coma after being assaulted on the London Underground tries to piece his life back together. Shuttling in dreamlike fashion between his hospital bed and a hazy succession of places—his apartment, friends' houses, a record shop, a bookshop, his childhood home, a shrine—he sifts through conflicting memories of his past and unanswerable questions about his present. The novel reaches for Kafkaesque ambiguity—is the narrator awake or in a dream? did he ever come out of the coma? is there a difference between ourselves and our fantasies?—but Garland's parable feels more like an exercise than a true exploration, constricted by its sluggish pace and plodding prose ('I stood. I raised a hand. I said, 'Hey' '). Forty woodblock illustrations by the author's father, Sir Nicholas Garland, a political cartoonist and artist, are handsome but function as little more than filler. By the end of the story, with the narrator unable to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, he finally decides, 'None of it was real. I didn't care.' Chances are good the reader will feel the same way.

When Carl awakens from a coma after being attacked on a subway train, life around him feels unfamiliar, even strange. He arrives at his best friend's house without remembering how he got there; he seems to be having an affair with his secretary, which is pleasant but surprising. He starts to notice distortions in his experience, strange leaps in his perception of time. Is he truly reacting with the outside world, he wonders, or might he be terribly mistaken? So begins a dark psychological drama that raises questions about the boundaries of consciousness." As Carl grapples with his predicament, The Coma plays with conventions, and questions our assumptions about the way we exist in the world, even as it draws us into the unsettling and suspenseful story of a lost suitcase and a forgotten identity.

After being attacked on the Underground, Carl awakens from a coma to a life that seems strange and unfamiliar. He arrives at his friends' house without knowing how he got there. Nor do they. He seems to be having an affair with his secretary which is exciting, but unlikely. Further unsettled by leaps in logic and time, Carl wonders if he's actually reacting to the outside world, or if he's terribly mistaken. So begins a psychological adventure that stretches the boundaries of conciousness.

On Richard's first night at a backpackers' hostel in Bangkok, a mysterious traveller commits suicide leaving Richard a map to the beach. An idyllic secret island, the beach is a legend among young travellers. But paradise isn't always what it seems. A compulsive first novel by Alex Garland now a blockbuster film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Richard.

Richard's generation do not see themselves as tourists - they are travellers who like to go to dangerous places. When Richard flies to Thailand he learns of the mysterious beach from a man who subsequently commits suicide. Teaming up with a young French couple, he sets off to find it.

In less than an hour, Sean has a meeting with a mestizo gangster. On the other side of town, Rosa listens for her husbands car, and thirteen-year-old Vincente is watching for the man who pays money for street-kids dreams. Tonight, these disparate lives will violently collide . . .