Empire Of The Sun

The classic, heartrending story of a British boys four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp. One of the ten books – novels, memoirs and one very unusual biography – that make up our Matchbook Classics series, a stunningly redesigned collection of some of the best loved titles on our backlist. Based on J. G. Ballards own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boys 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 authors 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.