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Title: Empire of the Sun

Author: J. G. Ballard

Narrator: Steven Pacey

Format: Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-09-14

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Winner of the Guardian fiction prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

From the master of dystopia, comes his heartrending story of a British boys four-year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. 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 20th century will be not only remembered but judged.

J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. His 1984 best seller, Empire of the Sun, won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His memoir Miracles of Life was published in 2008. J. G. Ballard died in 2009.

Critic Reviews:

An extraordinary achievement (Angela Carter)

A remarkable journey into the mind of a growing boy horror and humanity are blended into a unique and unforgettable fiction (Sunday Times)

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)

A brilliant fusion of history, autobiography and imaginative speculation. An incredible literary achievement and almost intolerably moving (Anthony Burgess)

An immensely powerful novel in a class of its own for sheer imaginative force. (Daily Telegraph)

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)

Members Reviews:

Quietly absorbing

Quite unlike anything I've read or listened to before. The characterisation is brilliant. Thematically powerful in an understated way. The tone of the narrator is ideally suited to the text.

Fantastic performance.

A brilliant book that takes you on a ( sometimes harrowing) journey through China during ww2.

My own knowledge of the war was somewhat Eurocentric, this book has widened my perspective particularly in relation to Japanese Pow's and their experiences. When you hear people say, oh he never really 'came back' from the Japanese camps, ' he/ she was never the same after' this book gives us detailed insight into why this is so often the case.

Narration is absolutely spot on, it would have been spoiled by 'sentimental'reading which would have been an easy trap to fall into.

As it's written from a child's perspective it is matter of fact despite the traumatic experiences.

The sort of book ideal for long drives as you can drift in and out of the story and don't need to be constantly focussed!

Stark and vivid.

This was not as I had expected - and not my usual choice. It is a stark and very vivid story of war time experience from a child's point of view.