Based on Ballard´s own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy´s life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai -a mesmerising novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches, which relates with unflinching honesty its almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint.

Rooted as it is in the author´s own disturbing experience of war in our time, it is one of a handful ofn novels by which the thwentieth century will be not only remembered but judged.