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wonderful boldness about the works of Beryl Bainbridge, ably assisted by her conjuror’s timing and an enviable ear for the way people talk. Sentimentality withers under her ironic, detached gaze, but canniness and black comedy flourish, as does laughter in this wily account of the ungovernable precariousness of love.
    Beryl Bainbridge was born in Liverpool and lived in London. The Bottle-Factory Outing (1974) won the Guardian Fiction Prize, Injury Time the 1977 Whitbread Novel Award, and Every Man for Himself the 1996 Whitbread Novel Award.
    Age in year of publication: forty-three.
     
     

James Baldwin 1924–1987
     
1953 Go Tell it on the Mountain
     
    This is a great novel about restriction and freedom, the urge to control versus the urge to love, the battle within each person between pride and vulnerability, weakness and religious zeal. It is written with a superb rhythmic energy and flow; the rich cadences in the prose are light and effortless. It tells the story of young John Grimes, who is sensitive, clever and religious; we watch the world of fraught family life and serious sexual temptation through his eyes, much as we do through Stephen’s in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist . But then the novel moves into the consciousness of three older members of the family: his aunt, who is dying; the man he believes is his father, a preacher in Harlem; and his mother. The portraits of the older members of the family are full of complexity and heart-rending loss and regret. Both his stepfather and his mother are hauntingly aware of a deep sensuality in themselves, much more fundamental than any religious feeling. Their stories give you a sense of the weight which John must carry, how his family and his religious heritage are burdens rather than gifts. Baldwin has a brilliant range of sympathy, an ability to create an intriguing and memorable web of relationships and stories. This, his first novel, remains one of the great books about family and religious bonds.
    James Baldwin was born in New York. His other novels include Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962). He was also an influential essayist and polemicist. He lived for many years in France.
    Age in year of publication: twenty-nine.
     
     

J. G. Ballard 1930–2009
     
1984 Empire of the Sun
     
    ‘“It might be a bit strange,” Jim admitted, finishing the last of the weevils.’ Jim is eleven in 1941, lost in Shanghai when Pearl Harbor and invasion by the Japanese separate him from his parents. He spends the war in an internment camp and on death marches. Straightening his tattered blazer, a Just William kind of boy, he uses every means in his power – servility, deviousness, expert scrounging , ferocious negotiations for food – to survive through years of starvation, disease and physical disintegration, described mesmerically by Ballard in a novel which is one of the truly great novels about war.
    As Jim gets hungrier, his open sores festering, the words Ballard chooses to describe the horrific last days of the war in Shanghai become brighter and brighter, almost incandescent. In his words of fire, the sun, the light, the sky, the beams in the air become as translucent as the human beings disintegrating into death in front of Jim. Ballard’s description of the chaos of war, the way men and women look as they wither from starvation, the way minds behave as they keep their bodies company, moves brilliantly through small human events – minutely recorded and heartwrenchingly moving – to take on large meaning. War is a young Japanese kamikaze pilot flying to death, unnoticed, unremembered; war is suicide, nothing more.
    J. G. Ballard was born in Shanghai, came to England in 1946 and lived in Teddington, Middlesex. This autobiographical novel has a sequel, The Kindness of Women (1991). A prolific and apocalyptic novelist, Ballard was also widely acclaimed for his many science fiction novels which explore ‘inner space’.
    Age in year of