King Rat
By James Clavell
 
First UK edition, first impression, published by Michael Joseph in 1963.
 
8vo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in gilt; some toning to the page edges, a solitary spot to the fore-edge and a very slight hint of off-setting to the endpapers, else near fine. In the original and unclipped dust jacket (design by Kenneth Farnhill, 21s. net); a very small nick to the foot of the hinge of the upper flap with an isolated area of moderate associated creasing, a soft crease to the upper flap, else near fine and exceedingly bright.
 
Clavell's debut novel, its subject and setting drawn directly from his own experience as a prisoner of war at Changi, Singapore, following the fall of the colony in February 1942.
 
The first published volume of the Asian Saga — a sequence of six novels spanning four centuries of Western engagement with Asia — it is at once the most autobiographical and the most geographically confined of the cycle, its action restricted entirely to the camp compound.
 
Though first in order of publication, it falls fourth in the saga's internal chronology, which opens in feudal Japan of 1600 with Shōgun (1975) and closes in revolutionary Iran of 1979 with Whirlwind (1986). Where the surrounding novels range across the broader political and commercial theatre of the region, King Rat operates at the level of survival, hierarchy, and moral accommodation under extreme duress. The American first edition was published by Little, Brown in 1962; Columbia Pictures released a film adaptation directed by Bryan Forbes in 1965.