The Famished Road

Azaro is a spirit child who is born only to live for a short while before returning to the idyllic world of his spirit companions. Now he has chosen to stay in the world of the living. This is his story.

What the critics say

Overwhelming – just buy it for its beauty – New Statesman

A brilliant read, unlike anything you have ever read before…the message is universal – The Times

It is a rich, provocative and hopeful vision of the world, stuffed full of drama and surprise-its literary lineage – the ease with which spirits move through every day life – is from ancient Greece and medieval romances – Independent

Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence. As one startling image follows the next, The Famished Road begins to read like an epic poem that happens to touch down just this side of prose… When I finished the book and went outside, it was as if all the trees of South London had angels sitting in them – Linda Grant, Independent on Sunday

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Songs of Enchantment

One great thought can change the dreams of the world. One great action, lived out all the way to the sea, can change the history of the world. The adventures of Azaro, the spirit child, continue. From the bestselling author of The Famished Road comes this radiant sequel.

What the critics say

Triumphant…a joyful and entertaining read – Guardian

A prodigious talent – Time

Reading Okri felt to me like talking to someone who has a secret – New Statesman

Ben Okri writes beautifully – The Times

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Tales of Freedom

As one of Britain’s foremost poets, Ben Okri is rightly acclaimed for his use of language. And as a Booker Prize winning novelist, this skill was shown to particular effect in both Starbook (his most recent work) and in The Famished Road.

In Tales of Freedom he brings both poetry and story together in a fascinating new form, using writing and image pared down to their essentials, where haiku and story meet. Thus we discover Pinprop, the slave to an old couple lost in a clearing, who holds the keys to the universe in his quirky hands. Then there is the beautifully dressed black Russian on the train, helping to film a new version of ‘Eugene Onegin’. Later, in the chaos of the aftermath of war, orphaned children paint mysterious shapes of bulls, birds, hybrid creatures, and we wonder if grief has unhinged them into genius…And who is that woman, who hardly speaks, who presses a tiny flower into the palm of the young boy on the bus, and then leaves his life forever?

Tales of Freedom offers a haunting necklace of images which flash and sparkle as the light shines on them. Quick and stimulating to read, but slowly burning in the memory, they offer a different, more transcendent way of looking at our extreme, gritty world – and show the wealth of freedom that’s available beyond the confines of our usual perceptions.

What the critics say…

Moments of genuine poetry and insight – Guardian

Beautifully distilled…these tales are full of simple, elegant description…Rarely, perhaps, has the love of ideas been expressed as simply and unpretentiously – Glasgow Herald

Tales of Freedom may transport into regions of untold rapture – Telegraph

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Starbook

Starbook tells the tale of a prince and a maiden in a mythical land where a golden age is ending. Their fragile story considers the important questions we all face, exploring creativity, wisdom, suffering and transcendence in a time when imagination still ruled the world. A magnificent achievement and a modern-day parable, Starbook offers a vision of life far greater than ourselves.

What the critics say…

“A work of magic” Sunday Times

“Booker prize-winning Ben Okri’s first novel in five years stands in the grand tradition of myth-making exemplified in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children, although the book has a vision and voice uniquely its own” Observer

” It is with epic grace that Okri constructs. [He] passionately considers the nuts and bolts of the creative process…how observing art might do so much as to effect change in a human being” Independent on Sunday

“Starbook is wondrous…[Okri] has a diction which glides superbly. His ear is pitch perfect” Scotsman

” A quite beautiful elegy…there is something delightful in Okri’s cosmic world-view” Big Issue

“Starbook’s language is so intensely lyrical it reads like a shaman’s incantation” Financial Times

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In Arcadia

A group of angry and ill-assorted people accept an invitation to make a journey. Inspired by a painting and financed by a mysterious benefactor, they set off to discover the real Arcadia. Or what remains of it. Their journey begins in ignorance and chaos at Waterloo station and takes them through superstition and myth to harmony. In the Louvre, in front of Poussin’s masterpiece, they begin to understand.

What the critics say

In Arcadia takes that staple Shakespearean theme of appearance versus reality and uses it to explore the notion of paradise – Scotsman

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Stars of the New Curfew

To enter the world of Ben Okri’s stories is to surrender to a new reality. Set in the chaotic streets of Lagos and the jungle heart of Nigeria, all the laws of cause and effect, fact and fiction, are suspended. It is a world where the lives of the powerless veer terrifyingly close to nightmare. In rich, lyrical, almost hallucinatory prose Ben Okri guides us through the fabulous and the mundane, the serene and the randomly violent. The unrelenting Nigerian heat and the implacable darkness of the black-out and the military curfew are the backdrops for this characters each finding their own ways to survive. We witness their dogged resistance to impotence, their unquenchable humour and their insistence on the possibility of love in the face of terror. Written with the lucid clarity and logic of dream, STARS OF THE NEW CURFEW is a book of visionary imagination.

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Astonishing the Gods

This is a story for all ages, set in a time and place best known to lovers of fairytales and myths. It is a modern fable, a way of understanding who we are now and how our search for identity affects our perceptions and actions, shot through with the gentle magic of Ben Okri’s imaginative prose.

‘Astonishing the Gods is properly worked and exact, and fulfils Calvino’s prescription for lightness – being like a bird rather than a feather’ New Statesman & Society

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Dangerous Love

With the simplicity and innocence of Narayan or Seth, he tells the story of a young man, Omovo, an office-worker and artist who lives at home with his father and his father’s second wife. In the communal world of the compound in which he lives, Omovo has many friends and some enemies, but most important of all there is Ifeyiwa, a beautiful young married woman whom he loves with an almost hopeless passion – not because she doesn’t return his love, but because they can never be together. Ben Okri builds a vivid picture of Nigerian life: of the compound with its complete lack of privacy, the gossip, the good times, the street life, the complex nature of family relationships and the kindness and treachery of friends. Overshadowing everything, is the image of a nation struggling to come to terms with the atrocity of the recent civil war.

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Infinite Riches

Azaro is a spirit child. He made a pact with his spirit companions that when he was born he would die at the first opportunity and rejoin them. But after his birth, Azaro broke his pact. His spirit companions have so far sent five spirits to reclaim him, who have failed. Two more are sent and are the most dangerous of all. In one sense Infinite Riches picks up where Songs of Enchantment left off. Azaro’s father has been implicated in the murder of a neighbour and Infinite Riches begins with his arrest and imprisonment. At the same time it introduces a new and enlightening aspect to the story of Nigeria. The writing is rich with allegorical illusion and vivid with magical imagery. This is Ben Okri at his inspiring best.

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Incidents at the Shrine

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