Alex Garland · 1996 · survival

Alex Garland's 1996 novel. A young traveller in Bangkok is given a hand-drawn map by a man who then cuts his wrists in the next room, and goes looking for a beach on a closed island in a marine park - where a small community has been living for years, and has decided that nobody else may find it.

1. 1
   Bangkok

   On the Khao San Road, in the backpacker economy of cheap rooms and shared routes, Richard is handed a map by a Scot calling himself Daffy - who has been talking through the wall all night, and who is dead by morning.

2. 2
   Ko Samui

   South to the islands, where the trail he is supposedly escaping is thickest - and with two French travellers he works out how to reach a protected island where landing is forbidden and boats do not go.

3. 3
   The lagoon

   Inside the island's ring of cliffs is a lagoon, a beach and thirty people who arrived the same way and have no intention of being found - and the community works beautifully right up until the point where it does not.