Jim is separated from his parents in a world at war. To survive, he must find a strength greater than all the events that surround him.

Shanghai, 1941 -- a city aflame from the fateful torch of Pearl Harbor. In streets full of chaos and corpses, a young British boy searches in vain for his parents. Imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp, he is witness to the fierce white flash of Nagasaki, as the bomb bellows the end of the war...and the dawn of a blighted world.

Ballard's enduring novel of war and deprivation, internment camps and death marches, and starvation and survival is an honest coming-of-age tale set in a world thrown utterly out of joint.

Empire of the Sun

• Empire of the Sun
• The Kindness of Women: A Novel
• Empire Of The Sun: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
• The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard
• Crash: A Novel
• The Atrocity Exhibition (Flamingo Modern Classics)
• Cocaine Nights
• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel (Oprah Book Club #62)
• Animal Farm (Signet Classics)
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What was more surprising is it was based of Ballard's actual events that occurred to him during this time. I found this book very interesting.

I found myself wanting to so bad to know that everything would turn out well in the end. I felt my mind completely engrossed in the book and I found myself day dreaming during the day and finding myself at Lunghua camp and realizing how grateful I should be that my meal is more than just rice and a sweet potato.

While reading this book I realized I had never heard much about the WW2 in the pacific outside of the American military operations of island hoping and the movies that came out of those events. Doubtful but it has made me more interested to read other books of the same nature, I want to go and read a book of someone who was in a concentration camp in Germany and then sit and compare what they had to go through, I would also be more interested now in reading more books of the pacific world war 2.

I'm trying really hard not to spoil the book for anyone who has not read it yet. Would I say this book changed my life.

An incredible book. There were a few missing points in the book that I wish I could know the answer to, like what happened to certain individuals after the end of the book.

Jim is crazy about airplanes and wants to be a pilot when he grows up. He admires the bravery of the Japanese soldiers and continues to idolize them, even after he is locked up in an internment camp where he sees up close the ugliness of war. Empire of the Sun is a well-written and realistic portrayal of a boy's struggle for survival during a brutal war. Jim is not always the most likeable character. The overwhelming brutality was a bit much for me, but readers who enjoy war stories will love this one. Set in Shanghai during WWII, the novel follows a young British boy named Jim as he struggles to survive after being separated from his parents. He can be surpisingly callous, but he is a survivor.

The story is a great look through a child's eyes at the WWII experience in Eastern China for British citizens captured by the Japanese. It goes from pre-war opulence to devastating prison camp existence to liberation.

Ransome's life is one that takes certain things for granted. Despite returning "home" to Shanghai, Jim's home will forever be Lunghua in the novel version. Ransome, a man whose selfless actions mildly amuse and baffle Jim, who cannot quite understand this brand of humanity which is quite different from the one he learned through his own experiences. The image of flight is strong throughout the story, as a form of escape, and in some ways the only vestige of childhood granted to this boy as he goes through a life full of cruel ironiesfirst, the inability despite repeated attempts to surrender to an enemy that he needs infinitely more than they need him; then, the odd realization that this "enemy" is his greatest protector and in many instances, friend; finally, that even with the war over he is in greater danger and further from his parents than ever. This symbolizes that the war is finally over for Jim, now he can go back to a normal life. It is this honest and uncompromising portrayal of Jim as a true tragic hero that separates the book from the movie, and makes this book one of the truly great accounts of surviving a brutal war that knows and shows no mercy.

The "happily-ever after" ending in the movie is filled with hope and relief. For me, the hauntingly beautiful "Suo Gan" that serves as that movie's de facto theme song perfectly captures the fragile yet enduring beauty of humanity that Spielberg so successfully captures in his movie version. these cease to have meaning for Jim. Ballard" may not be the same person (one crucial differenceBallard is never separated from his parents), Ballard is still the adult that Jim would have grown up to be.

For those who read the book first, I would imagine the movie would be a disappointing, sanitized version of the original work. In the book, however, the ending is much more nuanced. Seeing the far-from-normal life Ballard himself has lead, and the fiction he has written, one realizes that even though "Jim" and "J.G. I enjoyed the movie on its own merits, but I imagine the order in which you encounter them colors your impressionfor people like me who saw the movie first, it was easy to appreciate the movie, and then be blown away by the power of the book. The movie abounds with poignant moments of hope, warmth, and exhilaration amongst the great struggles that befall Jim and his band of acquaintances. Death, betrayal, illness, and hunger surround Jim and yet somehow he always managed to survive because he never despairs, never gives up, always keeps his wits about him, and as he himself explains, because he "takes nothing for granted." The world of WWII Shanghai strips humanity to its bare, naked, ugly core. Growing up in this environment, Jim becomes a remarkably complex character in spite of (or perhaps because of) his young age.

Jim's reunion with his parents is another, critical difference between the movie and the book. The novel overpowers the reader from start to finish by Ballard's stark account of Jim's survival against all odds, in conditions stacked heavily against him. Then they do. The odds of Jim being able to live what most of us would call a "normal life" are practically zero. The events are by and large the same, but the tone of the story, the horrors experienced by Jim, and the lessons and impressions instilled by the novel are on a different order of magnitude from the movie. after all, he has just experienced a lifetime of events more "real" and vivid than "normal life" could ever be; the war never ends for Jim.

Ballard's novel that served as Spielberg's inspiration. War, peace, friend, foe, cause, effect, even the distinction between life and death. Jim and his parents don't recognize each other at first. Finally, Jim is saved in an almost deus ex machina fashion by the heroic Dr. Jim is intelligent, naive, loyal, callous, hopeful, curious, delusional, and yet oddly lucidall at the same time. I enjoyed the movie, and Jim's story and haunting memory of Suo Gan made a lasting impression.

Just as the newsreels and magazines that tell of the war fascinate Jim in the book because they describe a war so different than the one he knows, so does Spielberg's movie tell a different tale from Ballard's book. The End. Normalcy will never be a suburban life in England, for Jim it is wartime Shanghai. Years later, I encountered the original storyJ.G. My first introduction to this story was, like many others, through Steven Spielberg's adaptation. Jim has not been afforded this luxury.

The movie was fantastic, and usually a good movie has a good book at its root. In this case, the writing didn't pull one into the story and let the reader identify with the characters.