Ben Okri

In a new novel from the Booker Prize-winning author, a group of world-weary travelers discover the meaning of life in a mysterious Swiss mountain village 'The Age of Magic has begun. Unveil your eyes.' Eight weary filmmakers, traveling from Paris to Basel, arrive at a small Swiss hotel on the shores of a luminous lake. Above them, strewn with lights that twinkle in the darkness, looms the towering Rigi mountain. Over the course of three days and two nights, the travelers will find themselves drawn in to the mystery of the mountain reflected in the lake. One by one, they will be disturbed, enlightened, and transformed, each in a different way. An intoxicating and dreamlike tale unfolds. Allow yourself to be transformed. Having shown a different way of seeing the world, Ben Okri now offers a different way of reading.

The Age of Magic

One of 2019's most anticipated novels in THE TIMES, IRISH TIMESand GUARDIAN. 'Where fiction's master of enchantments stares down a real horror, and without blinking or flinching, produces a work of beauty, grace and uncommon power' MARLON JAMES, winner of the Man Booker Prize 2015. An impassioned plea for freedom and justice, set in a world uncomfortably like our own, by the Man Booker-winner Ben Okri. In a world uncomfortably like our own, a young woman called Amalantisis arrested for asking a question. Her question is this: Who is the Prisoner? When Amalantis disappears, her lover Karnakgoes looking for her. He searches desperately at first, then with a growing realization. To find Amalantis, he must first understand the meaning of her question. Karnak's search leads him into a terrifying worldof lies, oppression and fear at the heart of which lies the Prison. Then Karnak discovers that he is not the only one looking for the truth. The Freedom Artistis an impassioned plea for justiceand a penetrating examination of how freedom is threatened in a post-truthsociety. In Ben Okri's most significant novel since the Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road, he delivers a powerful and haunting call to arms. 'Ben Okri is that rare thing, a literary and social visionary, a writer for whom all three - literature, culture and vision - are profoundly interwoven' ALI SMITH.

The Freedom Artist

Myth and naturalism are combined in the story of Azaro, the spirit-child who lives in an impoverished African village, and the upheavals that he and his family face

Songs of Enchantment

Topical and timely, Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri's new collection of short stories blurs parallel realities and walks the line between darkness and magic.

Prayer for the Living

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

Astonishing the Gods

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, the echoes of which presage the story's tragic

Dangerous Love

Booker Prize-winning novelist and one of Britain's foremost poets, Ben Okri is a passionate advocate of the written word. In A Time for New Dreams he breaks new ground in an unusual collection of linked essays, which address such diverse themes as childhood, self-censorship, the role of beauty, the importance of education and the real significance of the recent economic meltdown. Proving that 'true literature tears up the script' of how we see ourselves, A Time for New Dreams is provocative and thought-provoking. In an intriguing marriage of style and content, the concise but perfectly formed essays in this collection push the parameters of writing whilst asking profound questions about who we are and the future that awaits us.

Poetic Essays

A Time for New Dreams

Stars of the New Curfew

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.

Tales of Freedom

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.

Infinite Riches

Deborah Levy

Yuri Herrera

Valeria Luiselli

Twelve contemporary stories inspired by Shakespeare and Cervantes, to mark the 400th anniversaries of their deaths. Introduced by Salman Rushdie.

Twelve Stories After Cervantes and Shakespeare

Lunatics, Lovers and Poets

a magical tale of love and regeneration

Starbook

Aç Yol

Mangoshi lives with her mum and dad in a village near the forest. When her mum becomes ill, Mangoshi knows only one thing can help her - a special flower that grows deep in the forest. An environmental fable for adults and children.

The Vanishing Forest

Birds of Heaven

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE ‘So long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use’ The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. He is born into a world of poverty, ignorance and injustice, but Azaro awakens with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story. Despite belonging to a spirit world made of enchantment, where there is no suffering, Azaro chooses to stay in the land of the Living: to feel it, endure it, know it and love it. This is his story. ‘In a magnificent feat of sustained imaginative writing, Okri spins a tale that is epic and intimate at the same time. The Famished Road rekindled my sense of wonder. It made me, at age 50, look at the world through the wide eyes of a child’ Michael Palin

Ben Okri

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