The publicity material for Sightseeing is emblazoned with the slogan, "The Beach bites back". To understand what this means, you have to look back to the late 90s, when, with the grip of political correctness weakening, a generation of white, western writers emerged, most notably Alex Garland, who felt able to write about Asia without being crippled by the fear that nothing a white person could say about the continent would be worth reading. (Indeed, when a German journalist interviewed me about my novel Are You Experienced?, he began with the question: "So, is this book your revenge on post-colonialist literature?")