The Coma, Alex Garland
The Coma, Alex Garland
List: $12.99 | Sale: $9.10
Club: $6.49

The Coma

Author: Alex Garland

Narrator: Shaun Grindell

Unabridged: 2 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/18/2020


Synopsis

When Carl awakens from a coma after being attacked on a subway train, life around him feels unfamiliar, even strange. He arrives at his best friend's house without remembering how he got there; he seems to be having an affair with his secretary, which is pleasant but surprising. He starts to notice distortions in his experience, strange leaps in his perception of time. Is he truly reacting with the outside world, he wonders, or might he be terribly mistaken?

So begins a dark psychological drama that raises questions about the the human psyche, dream versus reality, and the boundaries of consciousness. As Carl grapples with his predicament, Alex Garland—author of The Beach and the screenplay for 28 Days Later, plays with conventions and questions our assumptions about the way we exist in the world, even as it draws us into the unsettling and haunting book about a lost suitcase and a forgotten identity.

About Alex Garland

Alex Garland is the author of the bestselling novels The Beach, The Tesseract, and The Coma, which was created with images by his father Nicholas Garland. He is the coauthor of the videogame, Enslaved. He has written the screenplays for 28 Days Later, Sunshine and adapted Kuzuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go for the screen.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Sam on February 06, 2015

I remember reading The Coma when it first came out some 10 years-ish ago, flying through it in a day and dismissing it as “eh, dream story, got it”. I’m glad I came back and re-read it and thought about it more afterwards as there’s a lot more to it than that (and understanding what I read, rather t......more

Goodreads review by Fabian on August 19, 2019

As modern writers go, this one has the career I covet & an incredible repertoire--he has been compared to Graham Greene. Well, this is the WRITER OF MY GENERATION (or Gen x, whatev), and therefore, it's Mr. Greene who should consider himself fortunate. (Forgive the hyperbole...) For a book that requi......more

Goodreads review by karen on June 15, 2008

this book was the perfect length for one queens-manhattan/manhattan-queens subway ride on a sunday shopping spree. sibilant, no? im more taken with that fact than the actual content of the book. i enjoyed it, but marabou stork nightmares is way, way better.......more

Goodreads review by Maciek on November 19, 2015

Alex Garland is the author of The Beach, a real tour de force set on a remote island in Thailand. The Beach is an awesome debut novel, and one which I read in two sittings in two days - I could barely tear myself away from it, from beginning to end. Garland's second novel, The Tesseract, was very di......more