Concrete Island: A Novel

by J. G. Ballard, Neil Gaiman (Introduction)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250171528
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	06/12/2018
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	359,318
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

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

Neil Gaiman has written highly acclaimed books for both children and adults and is the first author to have won both the Carnegie and Newbery Medals for the same work – The Graveyard Book. The L.A. Times has described his multi-million-selling graphic novel series Sandman as 'the greatest epic in the history of comic books'. Many of his books, including Coraline and Stardust, have been made into films; Neverwhere has been adapted for TV and radio; American Gods and Good Omens have been adapted into major TV series. He has also written two amazing episodes of Doctor Who and appeared in The Simpsons as himself. In 2013 he published his first adult novel for seven years, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which received stellar reviews and was a bestseller around the world.

gaimanbooks.co.uk / @neilhimself

For more on Neil Gaiman and his award-winning children's books, visit www.gaimanbooks.com

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher