Promotional Information

Violent rebellion comes to London's middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. / Chosen as a Book of the Year for 2003 in the Daily Mail and the Scotsman / Follows his paperback Sunday Times bestsellers Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, with which J.G. Ballard won the most widespread acclaim of his remarkable career, reaching a new generation of readers

About the Author

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. 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 controversial novel Crash was also made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg. His most recent novels are the Sunday Times bestsellers Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

Reviews

'Wonderfully warped, blackly comic! written with Ballard's customary panache, its potent mix of sex, violence and radicalism will keep his fans happy. Millennium People is at once deadly serious and slightly ridiculous -- and somehow all the more unsettling for it.' Economist 'Much of the fun of Millennium People -- and it is one of the most amusing novels I've read in a long time -- comes from watching as the world finally catches up with Ballard and Ballard, wryly, reacts.' Guardian 'Terrifying and strangely haunting! A riveting work from a writer of rare imaginative largesse, a bearer of bad tidings, unforgettably told.' Daily Telegraph 'Another disturbing and extraordinary vision exploring the nature of violence and pleasure.' Bookseller 'Ballard's flowing prose exerts its usual hypnotic spell and there are many darkly beautiful moments.' Andrew Martin, Daily Express 'Ballard, acutely fierce as ever, detonates a bomb under Middle England in his continuing attempt to shock the middle classes out of complacency and into violent struggle.' Esquire 'Very weird stuff! This is a tidy and thoroughly English sort of revolution, with the perpetrators considerately ordering skips beforehand. Ballard is a natural surrealist; his is a world where the unthinkable is commonplace and rationality chucked in the towel long ago. However deranged Millennium People might appear, Ballard's phrasing is as sure as ever. He writes wonderfully well about London. His characterisation is as vivid as it is strange. An extremely unsettling novel. Reading it is like having all the planks that underpin your life removed one by one and being forced to confront the brutality and emptiness that lies below.' John Preston, The Scotsman 'The strongest presence must be the sprawling, sinister, banal and electrifying metropolis that is Ballard's London. He has created a compelling city rooted in acute observation and extraordinary imagination. He is in a league of his own! who else could come up with "long-term car park of the soul"?' Sam Phipps, Herald

The middle class launches a violent revolution in this prophetic satire by the late master Ballard (1930-2009). David Markham, a psychologist, infiltrates the "rebellion of the new proletariat" at-naturally-a cat show, looking for the architects of the Heathrow Airport bombing that killed his ex-wife. What he finds are a bored coterie of suburbanites: charmingly unhinged academic Kay Churchill, biker-priest Stephen Dexter, and Kurtz-figure Richard Gould, who dreams of liberation from the 20th century. As David's spying becomes increasingly participatory, his actions begin to worry his second wife, Sally, who may herself be at risk of being swept up in Richard's plans to expand his campaign of structured "pointless violence." Ballard is a British Philip K. Dick, heir to Conrad and H.G. Wells, in whose stories the present, taken to extremes, anticipates the future. In fact, the only complaint to be made of this bruisingly smart novel is that it has taken eight years for it to appear in the U.S. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

First published in England in 2003, Ballard's deconstruction of middle-class unrest in modern-day London goes beyond protests to envision a people-powered terrorism. Psychologist David Markham narrates his eager free fall into a movement that reveals the unrelenting pull of violence and other human beings when systems let us down. (LJ 6/15/11) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.