Publisher Description

Concrete Island pays twisted homage to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Newly reissued with an introduction from Neil Gaiman. 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.

Author Biography

J. G. Ballard is the author of numerous books, including Empire of the Sun, the underground classic Crash, and The Kindness of Women. He is revered as one of the most important writers of fiction to address the consequences of twentieth-century technology. He died in 2009.

Review

"A vision in both style and substance. The literary equivalent of Salvador Dali or Max Ernst."--The Washington Post Book World "This is the excellent stuff of classic castaway adventure, stiffened here by contemporary overtones that call into question social values."--San Francisco Chronicle "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

Review Quote

This is the excellent stuff of classic castaway adventure, stiffened here by contemporary overtones that call into question social values. - San Francisco Chronicle "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

Details