Crash

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. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. 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 most recent novel was Kingdom Come, published in 2006; his autobiography Miracles of Life was published in 2008 to much acclaim. J.G. Ballard died in 2009.

The definitive cult, post-modern novel – a shocking blend of violence, transgression and eroticism – reissued with a new introduction from Zadie Smith.

When Ballard, our narrator, smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of auto-erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity.

First published in 1973 Crash’ remains one of the most shocking novels of the twentieth century and was made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg.

This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Robert Macfarlane, Martin Amis, James Lever and Ali Smith) and brand-new cover designs from the artist Stanley Donwood.