In my mid-20s, in the early 1990s, I moved to west London from Scotland. I remember meeting them, at parties in Notting Hill flats, in nightclubs, at raves. They’d be tanned, unshaven and stoned and they’d be saying things like, “No, man, Koh Samui is over. Phuket is just touristville now. You have to go to … ” I was moving among the backpacking, one‑upping, (mainly rich) young things that Alex Garland would skewer in his fiction debut a few years later, when he was, enragingly, just 26 years old. (Enragingly to me, at any rate: I was struggling with the outline for my own first novel, whose eventual publication was still nearly a decade in the future.)

The Beach is a recollection told in the first person (“Thinking about Thailand tends to make me angry, and until I started writing this book, I tried not to do it”) and it is peppered with cataphoric references (“Considering that two of them ended up dead and the other ended up nuts, I feel bad that their names mean so little to me”): tropes of horror fiction that conspire to create a feeling of dread, a warning about what is to come. Garland’s narrator Richard arrived at the Britpop feast like the Ancient Mariner, had Coleridge’s cipher been raised on Platoon, The Simpsons and Nintendo.

www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/02/alex-garland-the-beach-20-years-on