Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

      This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014

      First published in Great Britain by Flamingo in 1994

      Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1994

      The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

      Introduction © Rivka Galchen 2014

      ‘The Sage of Shepperton’ © Travis Elborough 2008

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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      Cover by Stanley Donwood,

      Assembled from a digitally manipulated linocut, iPhone photos and a photograph of atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, taken by Charles Levy © Corbis.

      Source ISBN: 9780006548140

      Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007384891

      Version 2019-02-04

       From the Reviews of Rushing to Paradise:

      ‘Mesmerising and poetic … compulsive reading’

       Financial Times

      ‘A subversive version of Lord of the Flies … Ballard’s relentless intelligence and wildly irreverent, absurdist humour collaborate in creating comically satiric sequences. A body blow to the pretensions in our century’

       Irish Times

      ‘Rushing to Paradise, which marks a return to the ecocidal territory of his first novel, The Drowned World, and has much in common also with the atavistic violence of Hello America and High-Rise, is essentially a portrait of the imagination of disaster … His ear for the descriptive cadence is unerringly acute, and while his imitators can only struggle to render violence explosively literal, Ballard remains a profound elegist of decay’

       Times Literary Supplement

      ‘A satisfyingly bizarre mixture of fantasy and fact … a dystopian vision of a paradise island overrun by a band of environmentalists’

       Sunday Times