Empire of the Sun
A British boy comes of age in a Japanese internment camp outside Shanghai — drawn from Ballard's own childhood.
The Verdict
The strangest and most haunting WWII novel in English, drawn from the author's own childhood. J.G. Ballard turns his boyhood in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and a wartime internment camp into the story of Jim, a British boy separated from his parents who comes of age amid deprivation, watching the war with a child's amoral, dazzled fascination. Ballard finds beauty in catastrophe and horror in the ordinary, and the result is unlike any other war book — a novel about survival, severance, and the eerie glamour the war held for a child who knew nothing else.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want
- War seen through a child's strange, fascinated eyes
- Literary daring
- The Shanghai internment experience
- An unconventional, haunting novel
Look elsewhere if you want
- Conventional war or combat fiction
- Moral clarity
- A documentary account of the camps
Why We Rated It 4.5
Historical Context
Empire of the Sun draws on Ballard's own childhood in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and his internment at the Lunghua camp. The novel follows the boy Jim through separation from his parents and years of captivity. Published in 1984, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987.
Events Covered
Editions & Reading Notes
Read It Alongside
Collector's Corner
Where to Buy
ISBN: 978-0743265232
Read This Against
The same events seen from a different vantage point. The fullest understanding often lives in the space between accounts that don't agree.
On Screen
This book was adapted for the screen. Here's how the two compare — and which to reach for first.
Ballard's novel stays locked inside a child's bewildered, unreliable viewpoint; Spielberg pulls back into spectacle and sentiment the book deliberately withholds. The film gives you the scale of the camps and the beauty of the aircraft Jim worships. The book gives you the disquieting interior — a boy who half-enjoys the war destroying him. Read first: the dislocation only fully lands on the page.
The book goes deeper than the film — it's above.
Other Books About the Same Events
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is Empire of the Sun autobiographical?
- Closely — it draws on Ballard's own childhood in occupied Shanghai and internment, though it is shaped as a novel.
- How does the book compare with Spielberg's film?
- The novel is stranger and more unsettling, with Ballard's distinctive eye for beauty within catastrophe that the film softens.