Empire of the Sun J. G. Ballard 9780007221523

The classic, heartrending story of a British boy's four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Newly reissued with an introduction by John Lanchester.

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.

This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard's works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Zadie Smith, Rivka Galchen, Hari Kunzru and Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs from the artist Stanley Donwood.

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.

'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

'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

'A brilliant fusion of history, autobiography and imaginative speculation. An incredible literary achievement and almost intolerably moving' Anthony Burgess