The story intertwines the lives of Manila gangsters, mothers and street children. The novel chronicles numerous characters in non-linear storylines and explores themes of love, fate, violence, power, and choices. It is Garland's second novel.
The term 'tesseract' is used for the three-dimensional net of the four-dimensional hypercube rather than the hypercube itself. It is a metaphor for the characters' inability to understand the causes behind the events which shape their lives: they can only visualize the superficial world they inhabit.[citation needed]
