J. G. Ballard

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come. Like everything else since the war, the sky was in a state of change. Based on J. G. Ballard’s own childhood, this is the extraordinary account...

From the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Cocaine Nights comes an acclaimed backlist title—an unnerving tale of life in a modern tower block running out of control—now reissued in a new cover style. Within the concealing walls of an elegant forty-storey tower block, the affluent tenants are hell-bent on an orgy of destruction. Cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks...

This fast-paced narrative by the author of Crash and Empire of the Sun is a stunning evocation of a flooded, tropical London of the near future and a foray into the workings of the unconscious mind. Set in the future, Ballard imagines a world in which global warming has melted the ice-caps and primordial jungles and swamps have returned to...

The definitive cult, post-modern novel – a shocking blend of violence, transgression and eroticism – reissued with an introduction from Zadie Smith. After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident. When James Ballard smashes his car into another, he becomes fascinated with the allure of violence. His new friend...

From the master of dystopia comes his heartrending story of a British boy’s four-year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Based on J. G. Ballard’s own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy’s life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai – a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, starvation, and survival, of internment camps and...