Book description
A terrifying vision of the future from one of our most renowned writers
- J G Ballard, author of Empire of the Sun and Crash.
Following the energy crisis of the late twentieth-century America has
been abandoned. Now, a century later, a small group of European
explorers returns to the deserted continent. But America is
unrecognisable - the Bering Strait has been dammed and the whole
continent has become a desert, populated by isolated natives and the
bizarre remnants of a disintegrated culture.
The expedition sets off from Manhattan on a cross-continent journey,
through Holiday Inns and abandoned theme parks, to uncover a shocking
new power in the heart of Las Vegas. 'J G Ballard's talent is one of
the most mysterious and distempered in modern fiction…It is futile to
have expectations of Ballard: he will inevitably subvert them' Martin
Amis, Observer
'A mythically resonant epic journey…A joy - witty, playful, moving,
mythic, poetic' Literary Review
'This fable lifts a great freight of ideas effortlessly…The story of an
expedition driven on by wishes of possession and power but guided
internally by myths of America whose sources lie in the late 20th
century' Guardian
'Enter Mr Ballard's worlds and you become entranced in a séance
difficult to break out of, so powerful is his method' The Times 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 made into an equally
controversial film by David Cronenberg. His 2000 novel Super-Cannes won
the regional Commonwealth Writers' Best Book prize. J. G. Ballard died
in 2009.
