The Famished Road: 1 (The Famished Road Trilogy, 1)
Ben Okri
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
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About Ben Okri
Reviews for The Famished Road: 1 (The Famished Road Trilogy, 1)
Time Out
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
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 Overwhelming - just buy it for its beauty
New Statesman
The Famished Road is a masterpiece if one ever existed
Jay Parini
Boston Sunday Globe
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
Azaro says that his is "a spiritchild nation, one that keeps being reborn and after each birth comes blood and betrayal". There's a glory in that. Azaro's scary, awesome, hallucinated childhood is a piece of sustained invention that turns out to be glorious in its own right, too
Angela Carter
Sunday Times