THE SUN IS SETTING OVER MANILA. In an abandoned hotel on the wrong side of town, Sean prepares for the arrival of Don Pepe, the mestizo gangster who runs the shipping lanes of the South China Seas. As he kills time, Sean discovers that his bed-sheets are stained with blood, the phone lines to his room are dead, and somebody has screwed a steel plate over the spyhole in his door ...
Elsewhere in the city, Rosa, a doctor, waits for her husband to come home. As she puts her children to bed she remembers the coastal village in which she was raised, and the boy who would meet her on the way to school. Meanwhile, thirteen-year-old Vincente begs from the stream of air-conditioned cars on Roxas Boulevard, keeping an eye out for the strange man who lives in the city's most expensive apartment block, and who pays money for street kids' dreams...
Tonight, these disparate lives will collide in a shattering finale.
ALEX GARLAND, acclaimed author of the bestselling début The Beach, has woven three stories together to produce a breathtaking second novel about fate, myth and survival, and lives inexorably entangled.