The Famished Road

The Famished Road PDF Author: Ben Okri
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1529114918
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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

The Famished Road

The Famished Road PDF Author: Ben Okri
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1529114918
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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

The Famished Road

The Famished Road PDF Author: Ben Okri
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 144813854X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 641

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Book Description
Journey between the land of the Living and the spirit world in this magical Booker Prize-winning novel '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' Azaro, is a spirit child, who in many traditions of Nigeria exists between life and death. Born into a difficult world, Azaro awakens with a smile on his face. 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 'This is a book to generate apostles. People will be moved and, with stars in their eyes, will pass on the word' Time Out 'Ben Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence' Independent on Sunday

The Famished Road

The Famished Road PDF Author: Ben Okri
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099929309
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 71

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Book Description
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.

Songs of Enchantment

Songs of Enchantment PDF Author: Ben Okri
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504061225
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Set in an African village, this follow-up to the Man Booker Prize–winning novel is “sometimes whimsical, sometimes bawdy . . . Fraught with wild visions” (The Times). “All is not well in the African village where Azaro lives. The child narrator of poet and novelist Okri’s The Famished Road, who had outwitted death in the previous book, again relates the oppressive events that continue to plague his village and his family. While political factionalization shatters the community's cohesiveness, the prodigious bar owner Madame Koto, chief exponent of the ‘Party of the Rich,’ alternately exudes portentous metaphysical malaise and miraculous erotic force. Little Azaro, himself touched and distracted by a series of animuses, follows the heels of ‘dad,’ who is a resounding vessel, by turns, of cantankerous egotism and abased self-sacrifice. This Nigerian epic reveals a violent provincial world, opaque with magical spirits which place horrendous ethical demands on fragile and fickle humanity, as if to test each individual for a thread of virtuous constancy at the core. Events drench the essentially linear narrative with all the ruthless sensuousness of a tropical storm, and Okri’s prose is lucid and deft.” —Publishers Weekly “Okri conjures up the fabulous with the same ease as he affectingly details the ways of the human spirit in a lovingly evoked African setting teeming with life—both real and mythic . . . Stunning.” —Kirkus Reviews “Once again we’re bedazzled and bedeviled by Okri’s phantasmagoric prose and the strange and wondrous sensibility of Azaro, a spirit-child living in a poor African village.” —Booklist “Both a love story and an account of the political turmoil between the parties of Rich and Poor.” —The Independent “Passages of extraordinary beauty . . . Okri paints a convincing surrealist picture.” —The Sunday Times

The Famished Road

The Famished Road PDF Author: Vanessa Guignery
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144386773X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Some twenty years after the publication of Ben Okri’s 1991 Booker Prize winning novel, The Famished Road, this volume proposes a spiralling journey into the imaginary homelands of its main protagonist, the adventurous spirit-child Azaro. Over the years, The Famished Road has been attributed a variety of mixed and sometimes contradictory labels (postcolonial, magic realist, mythopoeic, new ageist, picaresque, epic, to name just a few). Contributors to this volume have chosen to look beyond pre-conceived patterns and categories in order to embrace the otherness of the text and accept to be challenged by it. Disentangling themselves from the rationality of Western discourses, they have opened their minds to unfamiliar ground and new modes of being and seeing the world, which entailed bringing together various structures of feeling, modes of knowledge and protocols of representation, both African and Western. The purpose of this volume is therefore to offer new ways of reading The Famished Road that testify to the richness of Okri’s poetic prose and his reliance on indigenous mythical and oral traditions. The volume also includes an exclusive interview with Ben Okri who provides an insight into his writing processes and discusses the main themes, narrative techniques and literary strategies at work in The Famished Road.

Infinite Riches

Infinite Riches PDF Author: Ben Okri
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504061217
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
A potent combination of political, metaphorical, and mythical storytelling” from the prizewinning author of The Freedom Artist (The Scotsman). “Who can be certain where the end begins?” said Dad, shortly before he was arrested for the murder of the carpenter . . . This novel, the conclusion to the trilogy that began with the Man Booker Prize winner The Famished Road, follows the spirit-child Azaro, who travels between the worlds of the living and the dead. Set against the backdrop of a Nigerian village in turmoil, it is a novel about the multiple forms that wealth and power can take, the challenges of the physical world, and the wonders of the mystical world, by an author who has earned numerous literary honors and whose “writing is hailed for its intelligence, tenderness, poeticism and luminosity” (Financial Times). “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, author of Autumn

In Arcadia

In Arcadia PDF Author: Ben Okri
Publisher: Head of Zeus
ISBN: 9781784082574
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From Booker Prize-winner Ben Okri: a voyage into the enduring myth of Arcadia and the mysterious painting it inspired. A lyrical novel about art and enlightenment that takes the reader from Waterloo Station in London to Paris and a four hundred year old enigma, the painting by Nicolas Poussin known as 'Et in Arcadia Ego'. 'We never write the book we think we are writing. We never read the book we think we are reading' BEN OKRI.

The Freedom Artist

The Freedom Artist PDF Author: Ben Okri
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1788549589
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
One of 2019's most anticipated novels in THE TIMES, IRISH TIMES and 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 Amalantis is arrested for asking a question. Her question is this: Who is the Prisoner? When Amalantis disappears, her lover Karnak goes 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 world of 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 Artist is an impassioned plea for justice and a penetrating examination of how freedom is threatened in a post-truth society. 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.

Starbook

Starbook PDF Author: Ben Okri
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1407022555
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
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.

The Age of Magic

The Age of Magic PDF Author: Ben Okri
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1635422698
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In this enchanting 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 into 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.