'We're all strange inside'

Empire of the Sun (4th Estate Matchbook Classics) Paperback
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Empire of the Sun (4th Estate Matchbook Classics)

J. G. Ballard

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.

Reviews of Empire of the Sun (4th Estate Matchbook Classics)

    • ‘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

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