The 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 twentieth century will be not only remembered but judged.