Empire of the Sun

Empire of the Sun appeared in 1984, and J. G. Ballard drew it from the years he spent as a boy in Shanghai and in the Lunghua civilian assembly centre. The novel took the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and it appeared on that year's Booker shortlist; Ballard returned to the same experiences later in his autobiography.

The novel's Jim is separated from his parents when the Japanese take the international settlement, and the first part of the book follows him through empty villas and a city where the usual rules have stopped being enforced. Starving and hunted, he eventually surrenders to the Japanese army and is interned, and the camp becomes, strangely, the most stable place his life has offered him.

Ballard's interest is in what a boy makes of a world organised entirely around scarcity and war. Jim admires the Japanese pilots, is fascinated by the machinery of the camp and adapts so thoroughly to it that the prospect of going home becomes complicated rather than simply welcome. The book is written from inside Jim's perceptions rather than at a distance from them, so the war reaches the reader as a series of spectacles, deprivations and opportunities rather than as a political event. Tom Stoppard adapted the novel for Steven Spielberg's film, which kept that child's-eye view of history.