Concrete Island
On a day in April, just after three o'clock in the afternoon, Robert Maitland's car crashes over the concrete parapet of a high-speed highway onto the island below, where he is injured and, finally, trapped. What begins as an almost ludicrous predicament soon turns into horror as Maitland – a wickedly modern Robinson Crusoe – realizes that, despite evidence of other inhabitants, this doomed terrain has become a mirror of his own mind. Seeking the dark outer rim of the everyday, Ballard weaves private catastrophe into an intensely specular allegory.
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.