Empire of the Sun | Literary Criticism & Book Review

Empire of the Sun Critical Overview

Published in 1984, Empire of the Sun was highly acclaimed by critics and became a bestseller in England. In their review of the novel appearing in Newsweek, David Lehman and Donna Foote place the book "on anyone's short list of outstanding novels inspired by the second world war.... [It] combines the exactness of an autobiographical testament with the hallucinatory atmosphere of twilight-zone fiction."

Most reviews focus on the novel's serious subject matter. John Calvin Batchelor, in his essay, "A Boy Saved by the Bomb" in The New York Times Book Review, asserts that Ballard "has reached into the events of his childhood to create a searing and frightening tale of wartime China. Yet this novel is much more than the gritty story of a child's miraculous survival in the grimly familiar setting of World War II's concentration camps. There is no nostalgia for a good war here, no sentimentality...
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