Based on J G Ballard's own childhood, Empire of the Sun is the extraordinary account of a boy's life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai - a mesmerising and hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches, which blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the winner of both the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Empire of the Sun was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. 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 not only be remembered but judged.
