J. G. Ballard

Estrella de Mar is an exclusive Spanish resort for the rich, retired British. A life of leisure is offered by the surroundings and the thriving sports and social centre: Club Nautico. When five people die in an unexplained house fire, club manager Frank Prentice pleads guilty - but nobody believes him, least of all the police.

Based on J. G. Ballard’s own childhood, this is the heartrending story of British boy Jim's four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the second world war. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint.

Richard Pearson, jobless advertising executive, is driving out to Brooklands, a motorway town on the M25. A few weeks earlier his father was fatally wounded at a vast shopping mall there, when a deranged mental patient opened fire on a crowd of shoppers.

Led by charismatic doctor David Markham, a group of individuals form a violent protest movement to tear down the consumer society and replace it with a more meaningful existence. As middle England comes under attack, a sense of panic grips the capital.