fifteen had the strength, the luck, and the cleverness simply to survive Changi. And then there was King ... James Clavell, the son of a Royal Navy family, was educated in Portsmouth before, as a young artillery officer, he was captured by the Japanese at the Fall of Singapore. It is on this experience that his bestselling novel King Rat is based. ‘King Rat is the best novel in English to have come out of Japanese prisoner of war camps … James Clavell is a teller of stories. They are complicated and exciting, and you are desperate to know what will happen to his characters because they are like the people you know from your own life and experience, set in strange and sometimes terrible circumstances.’ - John Simpson.