Coming to Thailand and not reading Alex Garland’s The Beach is like going to the Louvre and not waiting in line to see Mona Lisa. It took me quite a while to get my hands on The Beach, but once I did, I couldn’t put it down. I’m sure that many people around the world saw Danny Boyle’s adaptation of the novel in 2000 (an immediate success with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role), but I wonder how many had read the book, too?

Actually, the book was published four years before the movie was out and it marked Garland’s literary début. The Beach was subsequently followed by The Tesseract (1998), a novel set in the Philippines, also made into a movie in 2003, and The Coma (2004), a novel about the human mind, adapted into a play in 2006. Alex Garland has also written screenplays and video games, fact which is not surprising at all for anyone who has read The Beach. The book reads like an extended screenplay with an overwhelming feeling that the characters are players inside a mammoth video game....

Thanks to Mihnea Voicu Simandan for the review, to read the full review click here.

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