Review: 'The Illuminated Man' - An Unconventional Biography of JG Ballard

The writer JG Ballard, who died in 2009, is a tantalising subject for a biographer.

His extraordinary childhood in prewar Shanghai, his family's subsequent internment in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and the death of his wife, Mary, at the age of 34, were formative events in the creation of his unique vision.

The vivid and sometimes shocking images he witnessed in his early life would resurface repeatedly in his fiction.

Yet he always resisted approaches from those keen to tell his story, and at the end of his life produced a curiously flat memoir, Miracles of Life.

The biographer's terminal illness and death is woven into this original and moving account of Ballard and his work.