JG BALLARD made his name with novels depicting mysterious cataclysms – The Drowned World, The Crystal World and the like. Only with Empire of the Sun in 1984 did the source of those visions become clear – his childhood in Shanghai and three-year
internment during the Japanese occupation, 1943-1945. Despite the privations – "skin infections covered my legs, malnutrition had prolapsed my rectum" – he loved the Japanese camp. Now he thinks he may have lived in the same small house in Shepperton for 50 years because it reminds him of that time. The "miracles of life" of this touching memoir – written after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer – are his children.
LORDS OF THE BOW
BY CONN IGGULDEN
(Harper, £6.99) LORDS of the Bow is the second volume of Conn Iggulden's trilogy on Genghis Khan (the third, Bones of the Hills, is out in hardback). Loosely based on known fact, it follows Genghis on his conquests into China in 1211, reciting his deeds in bald prose for the admiration of bloodthirsty readers. Occasionally, there's a useful observation applicable to office politics: "If a man could raise a sword, he should use it and there were no better opponents than the weak. They were less likely to gut you when you weren't looking."
THE LOUDEST SOUND AND NOTHING
BY CLARE WIGFALL
(Faber, £12.99) THE Numbers, the first tale in Clare Wigfall's absorbing collection, won the inaugural BBC Short Story Award recently, and you can see why. A bleak evocation of an outer-Hebridean community in the 1930s, its power lies in its ambiguities. You could pencil a novel in Wigfall's blank spaces. The washes of colour vary from story to story – a sad one-night stand in Epsom, a swanky party in LA – but all share a wry melancholy.
The full article contains 314 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
