Empire of the Sun

In the author’s own words, Empire of the Sun ‘draws on my experiences in Shanghai … and in Lunghua CAC [Civilian Assembly Centre] where I was interned from 1942–5’. The protagonist, Jim, takes Ballard’s first name and, like the author, is born in Shanghai to British parents. Aged only 11 when he is separated from his family during the Japanese takeover, he cycles through the Shanghai streets in search of his parents, scavenging food and sleeping in the beds of vanished families. While roaming the creeks and waste tips of Nantao, he finds a dubious guardian in Basie, a shrewd American hustler but, convinced that his parents are in a prison camp, his only hope lies in surrender to the Japanese, and four brutal years in a civilian internment camp.

‘A remarkable journey into the mind of a growing boy’ 

1. Sunday Times

Superbly introduced by the celebrated novelist William Boyd, Empire of the Sun illuminates Ballard’s entire body of work, revealing the roots of his nightmarish fiction (wrecked planes, empty swimming pools and tortured physicians) and his obsession with the effects of alienation and deprivation. As Boyd notes, it is Ballard’s ‘entrancing poetry’ that transmutes his own childhood trauma into something extraordinary, a stark world in which terror and beauty are enmeshed.

‘Nothing is as secure as we like to think it is’ 

1. J. G. Ballard