‘Art is despair with dignity’

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The Drought

J. G. Ballard

Water. Man’s most precious commodity is a luxury of the past. Radioactive waste from years of industrial dumping has caused the sea to form a protective skin strong enough to devastate the Earth it once sustained. And while the remorseless sun beats down on the dying land, civilisation itself begins to crack. Violence erupts and insanity reigns as the remnants of mankind struggle for survival in a worldwide desert of despair.

Reviews of The Drought

  • ‘A strange and rather wonderful book full of haunting landscapes, phantasmagoria and disaster that clangs on the mind. An impressive novel at any level. Its obscurities and surrealist flourishes only heighten the dreamlike atmosphere’ Guardian

    ‘The experience Mr Ballard offers is mystical…it is weird; it is grotesque; it is magnificently Gothic’ Sunday Times

    ‘By arranging a world drought to kill off the majority of people, he brings his characters to a state of timeless, arid obsession with what is left of water and of their own selves…a sensitive, baroque study in decadence’ Daily Telegraph

    ‘Ballard paints staggering imaginary landscapes. A very impressive book by a deeply serious writer, the originality and power of whose vision can be felt’ Times Literary Supplement

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