Violent rebellion comes to London’s middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.
When a bomb explodes at Heathrow, it looks like just another random act of violence to psychologist David Markham. But when he discovers that his ex-wife is among the victims he is compelled to further investigate the mysterious and shocking circumstances surrounding her death.
Acting on police suspicions he immerses himself in the strange world of London’s fringe protest movements. A quiet rebellion against middle-class normality is taking place. However as civic responsibility and the trappings of consumer society are jettisoned the movement grows steadily more bellicose and Markham is increasingly lured by the idea of revolution and terror.
J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His memoir Miracles of Life was published in 2008. J.G. Ballard died in 2009.