Ben Okri - Free Library Land Online - War

The Age of Magic

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 15:07:32 +0200

This novel takes us on a journey, a magical, and a literal one. A tightly knit group of filmmakers travel from Paris together to make a documentary. Unknown to themselves they carry a lot of unwanted baggage - fear, anger, jealousy, love. When they arrive in an idyllic Swiss village ringed by mountains and reflected in a lake, they discover a haunted world that will compel them to confront the demons they have been trying to escape. A mind-blowingly beautiful book, full of unexpected, poetic and metaphysical revelations.

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Infinite Riches

Thu, 29 Oct 1998 15:07:32 +0200

Ben Okri's new novel, continuing the adventures of Azaro, the spirit-child in the perplexing world of the living

Tales of Freedom

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:07:32 +0200

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.

Songs of Enchantment

Fri, 29 Oct 1993 15:07:32 +0200

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.

Dangerous Love

Tue, 29 Oct 1996 15:07:32 +0200

From the Booker Prize-winner Ben Okri: a classic love story set in a country trying to come to terms with its past. An epic of daily life, DANGEROUS LOVE is a story of doomed love, of star-crossed lovers, separated not by their families, but by the very circumstances of their lives. 'I hope among my novels this one achieves something I have long sought.' BEN OKRI.

Starbook

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:07:32 +0200

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 Last Gift of the Master Artists

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 12:45:17 +0200

'This is a story of a people on the eve of catastrophe. Others can tell of the catastrophe itself. I want to see the people in the last days of their innocence.' Ben OkriBy a riverbank in Africa, two lovers meet for the first time. They make a promise to meet again the next day, same time, same place, but only one of them shows up. This sounds like the beginning of a love story, but it's more than that, for this breath-taking tale takes the reader into the heart of a vibrant world, a complex and intriguing civilisation of warriors and kings, philosophers and artists, parents and lovers. A world and culture which is about to end, for glimpsed on the horizon, seen but unsuspected, beautiful ships with white sails are waiting...First published as Starbook in 2007, Ben Okri has spent many years rewriting this epic novel, set just before the arrival of the Atlantic slave trade. He has sought to bring to it a greater simplicity, to make the political and historical implications of the...

The Famished Road

Tue, 29 Oct 1991 15:07:31 +0200

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. He is born into a world of poverty, ignorance and injustice, but 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.

Astonishing the Gods

Sun, 29 Oct 1995 15:07:32 +0200

From Booker Prize-winner Ben Okri: a deceptively simple modern fable with an ancient origin. A young man finds himself living among invisible beings who have built a utopia based on one principle: that we must repeat or suffer every experience until we experience it properly and fully for the first time. 'The hero of this novel finds what he did not seek, and goes where he did not intend to go. As I did in writing it.' BEN OKRI.

An African Elegy

Sat, 18 Apr 1992 22:21:13 +0300

Dreams are the currency of Okri's writing, particularly in this first book of poems, An African Elegy, but also in his books of short stories and prize-winning novel The Famished Road. Okri's dreams are made on the stuff of Africa's colossal economic and political problems, and reading the poems is to experience a constant succession of metaphors of resolution in both senses of the word. Virtually every poem contains an exhortation to climb out of the African miasma, and virtually every poem harvests the dream of itself with an upbeat restorative ending' - Giles Foden, Times Literary Supplement

A Fire in My Head

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 13:25:13 +0200

A powerful collection of new and recently completed poems by Ben Okri covering topics of the day, such as the refugee crisis, racism, Obama, the Grenfell Tower fire, and the Corona outbreak.

In our times of crisis
The mind has its powers

This book brings together many of Ben Okri's most acclaimed and politically charged poems.

Some of them, like 'Grenfell Tower, June 2017', are already familiar. Published in the Financial Times less than ten days after the fire, it was played more than 6 million times on Channel 4's Facebook page, and was retweeted by thousands on Twitter.

'Notre-Dame is Telling Us Something' was first read on BBC Radio 4, in the aftermath of the cathedral's near destruction. It spoke eloquently of the despair that was felt around the world.

In 'shaved head poem', Ben Okri wrote of the confusion and anxiety felt as the world grappled with a health crisis unprecedented in our times.

'Breathing...

The Freedom Artist

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 12:00:35 +0200

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...

Stars of the New Curfew

Thu, 03 Mar 1988 18:12:00 +0300

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 his 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.

Incidents at the Shrine

Sun, 18 Apr 1993 22:21:12 +0300

Incidents at the Shrine is the first collection of stories by the author of 1991 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Famished Road. Whether the subject is a child's eye view of the Nigerian Civil War, Lagos and the spirit world or dispossession in a decaying British inner city, Okri's lyrical, poetic and humorous prose recreates the known and the unknown world with startling power.