Author: BALLARD, J G
Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Published on 6 February 2006 by HarperCollins Publishers (Fourth Estate Ltd) in the United Kingdom.
Paperback | 352 pages
197 x 128 x 21 | 244g
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.