Book details

Book description

From the author of The Sunday Times bestseller Cocaine Nights the story of suburban London transformed into an exotic dreamworld.

When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is surreally transformed into a reality more akin to a dreamscape. Vultures invade the rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet avenues, and the local inhabitants are propelled by the young man's urgent visions through ecstatic sexual celebrations towards an apocalyptic climax.

In this characteristically inventive novel Ballard displays to devastating effect the extraordinary imagination that established him as one of Britain's most highly acclaimed writers. 'A remarkable piece of invention, a flight from the world of the familiar and the real into the exotic universe of dream and desire…Dense and erotic and magical, a pleasure to read'
Malcolm Bradbury, New York Times

'Extraordinary…There is no doubt of the intensity and originality of the imagination that conceived the scenes of Shepperton transformed into a paradise…Far beyond the scope of most novelists' Spectator

'A remarkable fantasist…Ballard's eloquence is as lush as the flowering vines he hangs from his multi-storey garages'
Observer

'One of the most startling and original novelists. Extremely witty, Ballard's most optimistic book contains some of his strongest, most vivid prose…Exuberant fantasy' Time Out J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai. After internment in a civilian prison camp, 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. His controversial novel Crash was made into a film by David Cronenberg. His autobiography Miracles of Life was published in 2008, and a collection of interviews with the author, Extreme Metaphors, will be published in 2012. J. G. Ballard passed away in 2009.