"What makes The Beach a truly awesome piece of work is Garland's understated, assured depiction of the perils of pop." --The Village Voice

"The Beach will astonish readers... Not since reading Donna Tartt's The Secret History has this reader been so impressed and taken with a first novel." --USA Today

"The Beach is an awesome first novel that works as an adventure story, an allegory and an explanation for why every human since Adam and Eve has an irresistible impulse to create a perfect world and destroy it. A wonderful adventure and allegory that may be the best novel written by anyone currently younger than 30." --Sunday Oregonian

"Alex Garland... has a clear, engaging storytelling style and a vivid imagination. Deftly, he uses real-life travel details--smells, optical effects, quirks of language, social rituals--to keep the reader's disbelief at bay." --The New York Times Book Review

"Remarkable.... astonishingly assured.... The Beach is distinguished by Garland's bracingly transparent prose and tells a classic story of generational envy and displacement. A luminous voyage into the dark side of humanity's increasingly tenuous dreams of paradise." --Salon

"Generation X meets Lord of the Flies in this ripping good adventure yarn...Garland shows a precociously sure hand in this taut, exotic thriller. For a young author, he knows too well the peril of finding paradise on earth...a skillful first novel about the demise of an earthly paradise." --People

"[G]ripping, intelligent and written with a discipline many young writers only grow into." --New York Newsday

"The Beach makes for a relevant and fascinating read....an excellent critique of the backpacker phenomenon--its nouveau colonialism and its tragically misdirected idealism." --Time Out

"Garland's provocative style--somewhere between Joseph Conrad, Bret Easton Ellis, and Stephen King--creates a modern-day Eden where Nintendo Game-boy, "Apocalypse Now," and a drug-trafficking Thai militia blend seamlessly into the landscape." --Vogue