About the author

J. G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he and his family were held in a civilian prison camp. They returned to England in 1946. Ballard studied medicine at Cambridge and worked as a copywriter and a market porter before going to Canada with the RAF. His most recent books are Super-Cannes and Millennium People.

About the book

Empire of the Sun is based on J. G. Ballard’s own childhood and tells the extraordinary story of a boy’s life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai. It is a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches, blending searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint.

The novel won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was made into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1987.

Extract

“ ‘Jim . . ! Stop thinking . . !’ Mrs Philips, one of the missionary widows, caught him as he swayed forward, almost swooning before the image of this archangelic figure fallen among the paddies. Jim stood to attention, pretending to be weak with hunger, and trying to avoid the suspicious stare of the Japanese sentry at the dispensary door. He waited for the roll-call to end, reflecting on the likely booty attached to a dead American pilot. Soon enough, one of the Americans would be shot down into Lunghua Camp. Jim tried to decide which of the ruined buildings would best conceal his body. Carefully eked out, the kit and equipment could be bartered with Basie for extra sweet potatoes for months to come, and even perhaps a warm coat for the winter. There would be sweet potatoes for Dr Ransome, whom Jim was determined to keep alive.

He rocked on his heels and listened to an old woman crying in the nearby ward. Through the window was the pagoda at Lunghua Airfield. Already the flak tower appeared in a new light.

For another hour Jim stood in line with the missionary widows, watched by the sentry. Dr Ransome and Dr Bowen had set off with Sergeant Nagata to the commandant’s office, perhaps to be interrogated. The guards moved around the silent camp with their roster boards, carrying out repeated roll-calls. The war was about to end and yet the Japanese were obsessed with knowing exactly how many prisoners they held. Jim closed his eyes to calm his mind, but the sentry barked at him, suspecting that Jim was about to play some private game of which Sergeant Nagata would disapprove.”

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Background

• JG Ballard: My Empire of the Sun

• How I came to write Crash

• Extract from Miracles of Life by JG Ballard

• Miracles of Life by J.G. Ballard

Background

• The original Times review of Crash by J.G. Ballard

• J.G Ballard: How I write

• Surrealist seer of suburbia

• Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard

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