Crash - Tapa blanda

The novel opens with the narrator recovering in hospital after a serious car crash in which he has killed the husband of a young woman doctor. In his pain-filled dreams he finds himself dominated by strange sexual fantasies, and he determines to find the real meaning of this horrific experience. When he leaves hospital he revisits the scene of the crash, and meets the woman doctor. During their affair they begin an exploration of the motor-car in all forms, attending stock-car races, watching test vehicles being crashed, conducting a variety of sexual experiments on London motorways. A disquieting vision of the future in which sex and technology form a nighmare marriage.

J G Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China. After the attack on Pearl Harbor the family were interned in a civilian camp. They returned to England in 1945. In 1956 Ballard's first story was published in New Worlds. His first novel The Drowned World was published in 1961. Empire of the Sun, a novel based on his own experiences in China, was published in 1984 and won the Guardian Fiction Prize, the James Tait Black Award and was filmed by Steven Spielberg.