Concrete Island - Hardcover

BALLARD, J.G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224009702 ISBN 13: 9780224009706

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 1974

Synopsis

On a day in April, just after three o'clock in the afternoon, Robert Maitland's car crashes over the concrete parapet of a high-speed highway onto the island below, where he is injured and, finally, trapped. What begins as an almost ludicrous predicament soon turns into horror as Maitland--a wickedly modern Robinson Crusoe--realizes that, despite evidence of other inhabitants, this doomed terrain has become a mirror of his own mind. Seeking the dark outer rim of the everyday, Ballard weaves private catastrophe into an intensely specular allegory.

About this title

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.

Review

"Visionary of both style and substance . . . the literary equivalent of Salvador Dali or Max Ernst."--"The Washington Post Book World" "Ballard's novels are complex, obsessive, frequently poetic, and always disquieting chronicles of nature rebelling against humans, of the survival of barbarism in a world of mechanical efficiency, of ethropy, anomie, breakdown, ruin . . . The blasted landscapes that his characters inhabit are both external settings and states of mind."--Luc Sante" "

Edition details

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 1974
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0224009702
• ISBN 13: 9780224009706
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176