As the sun sets over Manila, Sean waits.
In the heat of a deserted hotel, watched by the indifferent eye of a dead telephone, he sits on blood-stained sheets and prepares for his meeting with Don Pepe, the mestizo gangster whose name is a black joke told quietly in bars around Manila ...
On the other side of town, Rosa is waiting too. Putting her children to bed, she listens for the sound of her husband's car and finds herself remembering the beach boy who would meet her as she walked to school...
Meanwhile, begging from the stream of air-conditioned cars on Roxas Boulevard, thirteen-year-old Vincente keeps 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 three disparate lives will collide in a shattering finale.
Alex Garland, acclaimed author of the bestselling debut novel The Beach, has woven three stories together to produce a breathtaking second novel about fate, myth and survival, and lives inexorably tangled.
