Nip the buds, shoot the kids - Kenzaburo O

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids recounts the exploits of fifteen teenage reformatory boys evacuated to a remote mountain village in wartime. The boys are treated as delinquent outcasts - feared and detested by the local peasants. When plague breaks out, their hosts abandon them and flee, blockading them inside the empty village. The boys' brief and doomed attempt to build autonomous lives of self-respect, love and tribal valour fails in the face of death and the adult nightmare of war.

'An angry, engrossing novel . . . It is an extraordinary first novel, an amazing achievement for a writer of any age. Myth-like and almost painfully suspenseful, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids has much in common with both Lord of the Flies and The Plague . . . His uncompromising honesty is what gives the story its universality and what makes its grim ending such a persuasive warning' New York Times

'No Japanese novelist has ever written more brilliantly than O about the division that exists in the soul of his country' Daily Telegraph

'A fiercely original book . . . Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids presents a complete and compelling world - a world powerfully remembered, powerfully imagined' Boston Globe

'Dark, elliptical and austere . . . His novels are quite unlike those of any other Japanese novelist' The Times