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which I’ve turned onto something even as settled as English suburbia where I now live. Nothing is as secure as we like to think it is. One doesn’t just have to think of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans – this applies to everything. A large part of my fiction tries to analyse what is going on around us, and whether we are much different people from the civilized human beings we imagine ourselves to be. I think it’s true of all my fiction. I think that investigative spirit forms all my novels really.

LIFE at a Glance

BORN

Shanghai, China, 1930

EDUCATED

Cathedral School, Shanghai

The Leys School, Cambridge

King’s College, Cambridge

FAMILY

Married Helen Mathews, 1956. One son, two daughters

LIVES

Shepperton, Middlesex

A Writing Life

When do you write?

Morning and early afternoon.

Where do you write?

In my sitting room.

Why do you write?

The great mystery.

Pen or computer?

Pen, then type myself.

Silence or music?

Silence.

How do you start a book?

I usually write a detailed synopsis.

And finish?

With a large full stop.

Do you have any writing rituals or superstitions?

No.

TOP TEN BOOKS

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville

The Loved One

Evelyn Waugh

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

The Trial

Franz Kafka

The Tempest

William Shakespeare

Catch-22

Joseph Heller

Our Man in Havana

Graham Greene

1984

George Orwell

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

About the Book

The End of My War

by J.G. Ballard

HAD THE WAR ENDED? For days, in that second week of August 1945, rumours had swept Lunghua camp. Shanghai lay eight miles to the north, beyond the abandoned villages and paddy fields, and I remember staring for hours at the apartment buildings of the French Concession along the horizon. The Swiss and Swedish neutrals who had lived there throughout the war would be tuning their short-wave radios to the latest news of the American bombing raids on Japan and the reported peace negotiations.

But in Lunghua camp we knew nothing. Their work-tasks forgotten, the British internees gathered in groups below the balcony of the Japanese commandant’s offices in F block, watching the edgy guards for the smallest clue. The rest of us stood outside the huts and dormitory buildings, gazing at the strangely silent sky. Every day the Mustangs and B-29s had attacked the nearby Japanese airfield and the Shanghai dockyards, but now they had failed to appear. Our food supplies had broken down weeks ago, and we were kept alive only by the emergency rations of the Swiss Red Cross.

I waited for my father to announce that the war had ended, but he knew as little as I did. He and my mother sat in our little room in G block as Margaret, my seven-year-old sister, played outside with the other children. Two-and-a-half years of imprisonment, sharing their rice conjee and sweet potatoes with me, had desperately drained them. I sensed that they knew something they had decided to keep from me, fearing that our years of internment might end in some sudden and brutal way.

Then, on August 8, we woke to find that the Japanese guards had disappeared during the night. At last we were sure that the war had ended! People gathered silently at the open gates, peering at the dusty road to Shanghai. A few of the bolder men stepped through the barbed-wire fence, testing the empty air. I joined them, and cautiously walked to a grave-mound two hundred yards away. I looked back at the camp, at the intense, crowded world that for so long had been my home. Freedom and the war’s end seemed fraught with danger, like the silent sky. I ran back to the wire, glad to be within the safety of the camp again.

‘Shanghai in the 1930s was the Paris of the Pacific, one of the gaudiest cities in the world. It was a place of bizarre contrasts, of foetid back alleys and graceful boulevards, art deco apartment blocks and half-timbered Tudor mansions.’

Others had already decided to leave Lunghua for good. Half a dozen