What the book says...
The heartrending story of a British boy's four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. 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 own time, it is one of a handful of novels by which the twentieth century will be not only remembered but judged.
What the critics say...
"A remarkable journey into the mind of a growing boy, horror and humanity are blended into a unique and unforgettable fiction" Sunday Times; "An immensely powerful novel -- in a class of its own for sheer imaginative force" Daily Telegraph; "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; "Ranks with the greatest British writing on the Second World War" The Times; "A brilliant fusion of history, autobiography and imaginative speculation. An incredible literary achievement and almost intolerably moving" Anthony Burgess
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