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.īallard’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. In streets full of chaos and corpses, a young British boy searches in vain for his parents. Empire of the Sun was a popular and critical success, earning a Guardian Fiction Prize in 1984, a nomination for the Booker Prize in 1984, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1985. Shanghai, 1941 - a city aflame from the fateful torch of Pearl Harbor. Ballards semi-autobiographical 1984 novel of the same name.

To survive, he must find a strength greater than all the events that surround him. Empire of the Sun is a 1987 American epic coming-of-age war film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Tom Stoppard, based on J. Jim is separated from his parents in a world at war. The classic, award-winning novel, tells of a young boy’s struggle to survive World War II in China. Must try and go there some time.“ Autobiographical story about surviving and growing up in a Japanese internment camp during World War II.” ~RookReading I seem to have been reading a fair bit about Shanghai recently, including the first good Tintin book, set a few years earlier. Long, long ago, I saw the Spielberg film of the book (and have almost completely forgotten it), and much more recently I read the author's autobiography which covers much of the same ground (with the important difference that he actually spent his period of internment with his parents rather than separated from them). The descriptions are vivid and visceral, and the human interactions in desperate circumstances all too plausible. Analyzes how jim, the third person narrator of the novel, is separated from his parents when the japanese. It's brutal and awful, yet the protagonist's innocence gives the whole narrative a vivid foundation, slightly distanced from the awful world of the adults, yet focused on important details like how many maggots you can eat to remain healthy. Opines that empire of the sun is a brilliant book. NwhyteThis is a tremendous novel, based of course on real life, about the experiences of a boy surviving Shanghai during the Japanese occupation if the Second World War.

Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard