Empire of the Sun
The classic, award-winning novel, made famous by Steven Spielberg's film, tells of a young boy's struggle to survive World War II in China.
Jim is separated from his parents in a world at war. To survive, he must find a strength greater than all the events that surround him.
Shanghai, 1941 – a city aflame from the fateful torch of Pearl Harbor. In streets full of chaos and corpses, a young British boy searches in vain for his parents. Imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp, he is witness to the fierce white flash of Nagasaki, as the bomb bellows the end of the war... and the dawn of a blighted world.
Ballard's enduring novel of war and deprivation, internment camps and death marches, and starvation and survival is an honest coming-of-age tale set in a world thrown utterly out of joint.
J. G. Ballard
James Graham Ballard (1930–2009) was a British novelist and short story writer who was a prominent part of the New Wave in science fiction in the mid- to late-1960s and whose work frequently focused on dystopian themes.
J. G. Ballard's best known books are the controversial novel Crash, an exploration of sexual fetishism connected to automobile accidents, and the semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, about his childhood internment by the Japanese during World War II after the invasion and conquest of Shanghai, where Ballard was born in the International Settlement. Both books were adapted into films, by David Cronenberg and Stephen Spielberg respectively.
Empire of the Sun
Empire of the Sun consists of 2 total books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.