The world is threatened by dramatic climate change in this highly acclaimed and influential novel, one of the most important early works by the bestselling author of 'Cocaine Nights' and 'Super-Cannes'. / A masterpiece from the early career of the author widely acclaimed as Britain's No 1 living novelist -- now reissued in a new cover style as part of the repackaging of the Flamingo Ballard backlist. / His critically acclaimed recent novels, COCAINE NIGHTS and SUPER-CANNES, have won J.G. Ballard a whole new readership and taken him back to the top of bestseller lists. / Typical of the early phase of his career, THE DROUGHT is one of his most powerful and memorable depictions of a world gone wrong, its exploration of a cataclysmic future shared by THE DROWNED WORLD (1962) and THE CRYSTAL WORLD (1965)

'A strange and rather wonderful book full of haunting landscapes, phantasmagoria and disaster that clangs on the mind. An impressive novel at any level. Its obscurities and surrealist flourishes only heighten the dreamlike atmosphere.' Guardian 'The experience Mr Ballard offers is mystical!it is weird; it is grotesque; it is magnificently Gothic.' Sunday Times 'By arranging a world drought to kill off the majority of people, he brings his characters to a state of timeless, arid obsession with what is left of water and of their own selves!a sensitive, baroque study in decadence.' Daily Telegraph 'Ballard paints staggering imaginary landscapes. A very impressive book by a deeply serious writer, the originality and power of whose vision can be felt.' Times Literary Supplement

J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His memoir Miracles of Life was published in 2008. J.G. Ballard died in 2009.