Empire Of The Sun
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the chaos of wartime Shanghai, a young English boy named Jim is separated from his parents and must navigate the brutal realities of Japanese-occupied China entirely alone — Empire of the Sun is J.G. Ballard's harrowing, semi-autobiographical masterpiece that chronicles a child's startling journey from privilege to survival. Set against the sweeping backdrop of World War II, the novel traces Jim's internment in a Japanese prison camp, where innocence collides with the machinery of war, and a boy is forced to reinvent himself through sheer will and imagination. Ballard writes with a cool, visionary intensity that transforms the horror of conflict into something almost hallucinatory — his prose is precise yet luminous, capturing the moral ambiguity of survival with unflinching clarity. Drawing directly from his own wartime childhood, he crafts a narrative that sits at the intersection of memoir and myth, presenting war not as heroism but as a strange, distorting lens through which a child perceives the adult world. One of the most critically acclaimed British novels of the twentieth century, it raises a haunting question: what does it cost a child to survive, and what remains of him when the war is finally over?
Author: J. G. Ballard
Format: Paperback
Published: 1991, Victor Gollancz Ltd
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the chaos of wartime Shanghai, a young English boy named Jim is separated from his parents and must navigate the brutal realities of Japanese-occupied China entirely alone — Empire of the Sun is J.G. Ballard's harrowing, semi-autobiographical masterpiece that chronicles a child's startling journey from privilege to survival. Set against the sweeping backdrop of World War II, the novel traces Jim's internment in a Japanese prison camp, where innocence collides with the machinery of war, and a boy is forced to reinvent himself through sheer will and imagination. Ballard writes with a cool, visionary intensity that transforms the horror of conflict into something almost hallucinatory — his prose is precise yet luminous, capturing the moral ambiguity of survival with unflinching clarity. Drawing directly from his own wartime childhood, he crafts a narrative that sits at the intersection of memoir and myth, presenting war not as heroism but as a strange, distorting lens through which a child perceives the adult world. One of the most critically acclaimed British novels of the twentieth century, it raises a haunting question: what does it cost a child to survive, and what remains of him when the war is finally over?