Miracles Of Life cover art

Miracles Of Life

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Miracles Of Life

By: J G Ballard
Narrated by: Tim Pigott-Smith
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £8.99

Buy Now for £8.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

'Miracles of Life' opens and closes in Shanghai, the city where J.G.Ballard was born, and where he spent the most of the Second World War interned with his family in a Japanese concentration camp.

J.G. Ballard was, for over fifty years, one of this country’s most significant writers. Beginning with the events that inspired his classic novel, “Empire of the Sun”, in this revelatory autobiography he charts the course of his astonishing life.

“Miracles of Life” takes us from the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai, to the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of Lunghua Camp, to Ballard’s arrival in a devastated Britain. Ballard recounts his first attempts at fiction and his part in the social and artistic revolutions of the 60s. He describes his friendships with figures as diverse as Kingsley Amis, Michael Moorcock and Eduardo Paolozzi alongside recollections of his domestic life in Shepperton – raising three children as a single father following the unexpected and premature death of his wife.

“Miracles of Life” is both a captivating narrative of the experiences that have shaped this extraordinary writer’s works, his distinctive outlook and his original visions of the future, and is also an account of a remarkable life.

©2008 J G Ballard (P)2008 HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, London UK Imperial Japan China

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Crystal World cover art
Light and Shadow cover art
Her Brilliant Career cover art
Unexhausted Time cover art
Flesh Wounds cover art
The Last Englishmen cover art
After Auschwitz cover art
Did You Really Shoot the Television?: A Family Fable cover art
The Bletchley Girls cover art
Just Me cover art
The Life of a Country Vet cover art
The Road Taken cover art
Travelling to Infinity cover art
Escaping Hitler cover art

Critic reviews

"A particular delight of this lyrical autobiography lies in spotting the landscapes and events that appear subtly reconfigured in Ballard's fiction." ( Observer, Critics' Picks for 2008)
"The long-awaited memoirs of one of the most interesting British writers." ( Sunday Times, Picks for 2008)
"Unobtrusively well-written...and fascinating." ( Literary Review)
All stars
Most relevant  
Sadly this version does not contain the whole book.
There’s a second version on audio that may have the whole book.

Be ware, this version does not contain the whole book.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Not a very long book so lord knows why it needed to be abridged, a fact that the product summary doesn't mention. The abridgement is clearly done with an eye towards the fans of Empire of the Sun and so includes the rather odd decision to basically lop off the final 20% of the story from the book. No abridgement of thost parts, they're just not there at all. Leaves the weird impression that for Ballard, life ended after the death of his wife and nothing else happened thereafter. A sad way to represent his final, and very moving, work.

Abridged, weirldy

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Interesting until it just cuts off way before the end. It ruined it for me.

Enjoyable until it just stops

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.