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.
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First, the disclaimer: I love J.G. Ballard’s work. That said, this is a novel that deserves love. This semi-autobiographical saga opens in Shanghai at the beginning of World War Two. An invasion by the Army of Japan is imminent. The wealthy foreign traders who live in the Shanghai International Settlement are scrambling to safety. The stage is …
In his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun J.G. Ballard tells us how he survived his adolescent years alone in an internment camp during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai during World War II. I first learned of Ballard’s story through Steven Spielberg’s wonderful film of the same name, which I watched when it came out in 1989. And then I …
This is a graphic account of life on the street and in an internment camp for an eleven year old English boy lost in Shanghai when the Japanese invade. It depicts the blood and filth of World War Two from a civilian perspective and shows how even the innocent must learn to be cruel to survive.