Empire of the Sun
About this audiobook
The heartrending story of British boy Jim’s four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the second world war. Filmed by Steven Spielberg.
Now available for the first time on CD.
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.
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About the author
J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and 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, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His controversial novel ‘Crash’ was also made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg. His most recent novels include the Sunday Times bestsellers ‘Cocaine Nights’ and ‘Super-Cannes’.
