Miracles of Life
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4.7 • 22 Ratings
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- £6.49
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
J. G. Ballard was, for over fifty years, one of this country's most significant writers. Beginning with the events that inspired his classic novel, ‘Empire of the Sun’, this revelatory autobiography charts the course of his astonishing life.
‘Miracles of Life’ takes us from the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai, to the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of Lunghua Camp, to Ballard’s arrival in a devastated Britain. Ballard recounts his first attempts at fiction and his part in the social and artistic revolutions of the 60s. He describes his friendships with figures as diverse as Kingsley Amis, Michael Moorcock and Eduardo Paolozzi alongside recollections of his domestic life in Shepperton – raising three children as a single father following the unexpected and premature death of his wife.
‘Miracles of Life’ is both a captivating narrative of the experiences that have shaped this extraordinary writer’s works, his distinctive outlook and his original visions of the future, and is also an account of a remarkable life.
Reviews
‘Superb. Mr Ballard, you are wonderful’ Sunday Times
‘Exquisitely written … ‘Miracles of Life’, a subtle, restlessly enquiring work of touching humanity, is Ballard’s crowning achievement’ Financial Times
‘Brief, modest and occasionally shattering, in a way that elevates it to a level of greatness’ Observer
‘A jewel. As a writer, he can simply take the breath away’ Independent
‘The terrifying thing about Ballard is his logic; is this science fiction or history written ahead of its time?’ Len Deighton
About the author
J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai. After internment in a civilian prison camp, his family returned to England in 1946. His 1984 bestseller ‘Empire of the Sun’ won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His controversial novel ‘Crash’ was made into a film by David Cronenberg. His autobiography ‘Miracles of Life’ was published in 2008, and a collection of interviews with the author, ‘Extreme Metaphors’, was published in 2012. J. G. Ballard passed away in 2009.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Completed just before he died in 2009 at age 79, this compelling memoir by SF novelist Ballard (Kingdom Come) vividly portrays the vanished world of the British upper classes in Shanghai and Cambridge before and after WWII. Some of Ballard's real-life adventures growing up in Shanghai appeared in his dazzling 1984 novel (and later Spielberg vehicle), Empire of the Sun, and here he fleshes out his privileged life as the son of a prominent China Printing and Finishing Company executive living in a comfortable house in the international suburbs of Shanghai full of servants named only No. 1 boy or No. 2 Coolie. Despite the Japanese invasion of 1937, a pleasant social life continued, insulated from Chinese destitution, yet in telling, lurid flashes, Ballard as a boy became aware of the wretchedness of others' lives around him and the violence the war wrought. Interned from 1943 until the end of the war with other internationals at the malaria-prone Lunghua Camp, Ballard felt an intimacy with his parents he had never known before, and which he later imparted in the single-handed raising of his own three children after the untimely death of his young wife, Mary. From his first novel in 1963, The Drowned World, Ballard lived "on the fringes of literary London," plying his trade in science fiction because of what he gleaned in its "vitality" and "visionary engine." Early influences like Victor Gollancz, Kingsley Amis, and Eduardo Paolozzi appear within these pages of Ballard's poignant and ephemeral "stage set."
Customer Reviews
If you are a Ballard fan.
It's not Ballard's best. It isn't even one of his most playful of books, though that's not to say it doesn't lack humour. However it is certainly one of his most honest books and it's sparse reality is rather elegant.
Here is an artist of considerable talent and originality, simply putting the record straight and tidying up his literary and creative legacy.
Ballard was a great English writer and quite unique. This small book is bare bones and simple. It takes a rare mind with real courage to write like this.
thank you Mr Ballard for your stories..