Book details

Book description

The heartrending story of a British boy's four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War.

Based on J. G. Ballard's own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy's life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai - a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint.

Rooted as it is in the author's own disturbing experience of war in our time, it is one of a handful of novels by which the twentieth century will be not only remembered but judged. 'An extraordinary achievement.' Angela Carter

'A remarkable journey into the mind of a growing boy…horror and humanity are blended into a unique and unforgettable fiction.' Sunday Times

'An immensely powerful novel - in a class of its own for sheer imaginative force.' Daily Telegraph

'Remarkable…form, content and style fuse with complete success…one of the great war novels of the 20th century.' William Boyd

'Gripping and remarkable…I have never read a novel which gave me a stronger sense of the blind helplessness of war…unforgettable.' Observer

'Ranks with the greatest British writing on the Second World War.' The Times

'A brilliant fusion of history, autobiography and imaginative speculation. An incredible literary achievement and almost intolerably moving.' Anthony Burgess J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. His 1984 bestseller 'Empire of the Sun' won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His controversial novel 'Crash' was also made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg. His most recent novels include the Sunday Times bestsellers 'Cocaine Nights' and 'Super-Cannes'.