Book details

Book description

The remarkable bestseller from the author of Crash - Cocaine Nights is an engrossing mystery and unnerving vision of a society enjoying a life of unlimited leisure.

When Charles Prentice arrives in Spain to investigate his brother's involvement in the death of five people in a fire in the upmarket coastal resort of Estrella de Mar, he gradually discovers that beneath the civilised, cultured surface of this exclusive enclave for Britain's retired rich there flourishes a secret world of crime, drugs and illicit sex . What starts as an engrossing mystery develops into a mesmerising novel of ideas - a dazzling work of the imagination from one of Britain's most original and controversial novelists - author of Super-Cannes and Millennium People. '[Ballard] is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilarating imagination - and a national treasure' Guardian

'Britain's number one living novelist. This adds a glinting new facet to his achievement - Ballard, detective-novelist extraordinary' Sunday Times

'As thrillingly wired as ever…Dazzlingly original' Independent

'Utterly compulsive' Sunday Telegraph 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, was published in 2012. J. G. Ballard passed away in 2009.