A wise, enchanting novel about love, power, and our many selves--past and future, public and private--from the Booker Prize-winning author.

There are organizations for people who grieve, for alcoholics and other kinds of addicts. But if you've been devastated by the love of your life walking out on you, where the hell do you go?

On the 20th anniversary of the day her first husband left her, Viv decides to host an unconventional party for those burned by love. She successfully ropes in her reluctant second husband, Alan, and their friends Beatrice and Stephen, and when she meets the famed fortuneteller Madame Sosostris--last seen in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and rumored to be the secret to success of 5 prime ministers--she believes she's found the perfect act to headline her masquerade.

In a sacred wood in the south of France, the partygoers disguise themselves and wait eagerly for the great clairvoyant, who might be able to mend their broken pasts and brighten their futures. But the night soon goes awry, in a comically revealing way that causes our couples to question their relationships and the direction of their lives.

Freedom is the most precious commodity in the world. In this powerful collection, the celebrated novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet Ben Okri explores the beauty contained in each one of us--the freedom of our spirit, the child within. He recalls the death of his father, the sacrifices of his mother, the hidden river of Edinburgh, falling in love. He writes about Virgil and Mozambique, about ringing the bell for freedom, the dreams of Calliope and the full moon. He enters the fifth circle, sings of the roses of spring, and aligns the pyramids to the magic stars.

This is a gorgeous, exciting collection for everyone who loves Ben Okri's vibrant style, and a perfect introduction to new readers of his poetry.

Award-winning writer Ben Okri, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Famished Road, curates this one-volume overview of the best of African literature. Here is a pantheon of enormous talents from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, hailing from a wide variety of countries and cultures and including multiple winners of the Nobel Prize in literature, the Booker Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. The writers include Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Tayeb Salih, Doris Lessing, J. M. Coetzee, M. G. Vassanji, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, and many more.

The short story form has a rich history on the African continent, drawing on a deep well of traditional oral tales, fables, and legends as well as a vital and ongoing engagement with the forces of history and modernity. Subjects range from the vicissitudes of daily life to sweeping social commentary, with such varied characters as a shopkeeper yearning for love in Abdulrazak Gurnah's Cages, a faith-healing priest in Bessie Head's Jacob, a freedom fighter facing apartheid in Nadine Gordimer's Amnesty, and invading aliens overcome by music in Emmanuel Boundzéki Dongala's Jazz and Palm Wine. Whether they touch on the spirit world, the urban experience, colonialism, politics, humor, or love, these stories are both dazzling and moving.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. The life he foresees for himself and the tale he tells is full of sadness and tragedy, but inexplicably he is born 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 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.

In every moment, we are part of the infinite stories that the universe is telling us and that we are telling the universe.

Packed with ideas and inspiration, The Mystery Feast offers numerous pathways into the magical world of storytelling. Beginning with a poem, All we do, Booker prize-winning novelist Ben Okri presents his considered thoughts on the purpose and meaning of stories, concluding with a series of condensed Notes to the modern storyteller. The collection is completed with a stoku--a brief tale on the theme.

Based on decades of honing his art, this stimulating booklet gives a glimpse into the mind of a master of contemporary storytelling.

An epic of daily life, Dangerous Love is one of Ben Okri's most accessible and most disarming novels.
Omovo is 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 both friends and enemies, but his most important relationship is with 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.
Against the backdrop of Nigeria's civil war, Ben Okri creates an atmosphere where passion takes on a wholly different dimension as danger, greed, hunger, and betrayal loom at every turn.

First published in 1992, Ben Okri's remarkable debut collection features poems that are now considered classics and taught in schools and universities worldwide. Here he plays with the mystique of the African continent, countering simplistic narratives of suffering that have been imposed on it with vibrant, nuanced portraits of the traditions and resilience of African peoples. An invaluable window onto Okri's experiences as a Nigerian immigrant to the United Kingdom and as a writer discovering his calling, these poems also speak to universal truths about love, injustice, and the search for meaning.

An environmental fairytale that speaks eloquently to the most pressing issues of our times, from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Famished Road.

Mangoshi lives with her mom and dad in a village near the forest. When her mom becomes ill, Mangoshi knows only one thing can help her--a special flower that grows deep in the forest.

The little girl needs all her courage when she sets out alone to find and bring back the flower, and all her kindness to overpower the dangers she encounters on the quest.

Ben Okri brings the power of his mystic vision to a timely story that weaves together wonder, adventure, and environmentalism.

A young man finds himself among invisible beings who have built a world based on one principle: that we must repeat every experience until we live it fully for the first time. Only then can we find what we didn't seek and go where we don't intend to go.

Ben Okri navigates the world at once as a writer, an artist, a musician, and a philosopher--in the process, he challenges our craving for the visual and the concrete. We read him not only with our eyes but also with our senses, our intuition. As his story unfolds we begin to inhabit the ineffable land that he creates, our imagination led to a place where what we once thought were fundamental truths are turned magically on their heads.

In the difficult times we live in, in an age decimated by injustice and inequality, Okri brings unexpected insights as meaningful as they are transformative.

Maybe what seeks us is better than what we seek.

A boy and a girl meet by chance on a riverbank in Africa. One is the son of a king, struggling to find his place in the world, the other the daughter of a craftsman from the secretive tribe of master artists. The prince, entranced, stays hidden in the bushes. The girl, knowing nothing of him but his voice, agrees to meet again. When she fails to appear the next day, he begins to search for her, tracing her at last to her village where, disguised as an apprentice, he finds a place in her father's workshop.
But this is no fairy tale, no conventional love story. Their world--though they don't know it yet--is ending. A strange wind has begun to blow, and in its wake, things are disappearing: songs, stories, artworks, and finally, people. Beautiful ships with white sails are glimpsed on the horizon...
When the novel was first published in the UK in 2007 under the title Starbook, the central role of the Middle Passage was overlooked. Okri has since rewritten the book, giving it a new dimension, more light, more acumen. In 2022 the deep political impact of this extraordinary tale won't be missed.

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.
Grenfell Tower, June 2017 was published in the Financial Times less than ten days after the fire, and Okri's reading of it was played more than six million times on Facebook.
Notre-Dame Is Telling Us Something was first read on BBC Radio 4, in the aftermath of the cathedral's near destruction. It speaks eloquently of the despair that was felt around the world.
In shaved head poem, Okri writes of the confusion and anxiety felt as the world grappled with a health crisis unprecedented in our times.
Breathing the Light is his response to the events of summer 2020, when a Black man died beneath the knee of a white policeman, a tragedy sparking a movement for change.
These poems and others, including poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa, Barack Obama, Amnesty International, and more, make this a uniquely powerful collection that blends anger and tenderness with Okri's inimitable vision.

A perfect read for a post-truth era. --NPR

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 that to find Amalantis, he must first understand the meaning of her question.Karnak's search leads him into a terrifying world of deception, 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.

A perfect read for a post-truth era. --NPR

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 that to find Amalantis, he must first understand the meaning of her question.Karnak's search leads him into a terrifying world of deception, 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.

A Library Journal Best Book of 2021

No matter how different each story is in context or story line, Prayer for the Living is not simply a collection of different tales, it is a deliberate assemblage of universal truths that explores what it means to seek and to live. --Los Angeles Review of Books

Playful, frightening, shocking--these stories from a writer at the height of his power will make you think, or make you laugh. Sometimes they'll make you want to look away, but they will always hold your gaze.

These are stories set in London, in Byzantium, in the ghetto, in the Andes, and in a printer's shop in Lagos. Characters include a murderer, a writer, a detective, a woman in a dream, a man in a mirror, a little girl, a prison door, and the author himself.

Each one of these twenty-four stories will make you wonder if what you see in the world can really be all there is . . .

In this poignant, timely collection, the renowned Booker Prize-winning author evokes the magic of nature and the urgency of protecting our environment.

Twenty thousand years after a catastrophe wiped out the human race, visitors uncover their final messages scattered across the planet, in flooded cities and disintegrating books. These writings reveal the tragedies of people who continued to live as they always did--fearfully, selfishly--even as the end of their world loomed.
These haunting stories within a story, together with a powerful selection of poems, fables, and essays, are a necessary reminder of the beauty of the earth and the importance of addressing the climate crisis with clarity, artistry, and passion.

There is much to celebrate in the human journey so far--art in all its forms, advances made in the fields of technology and medicine, and for many of us, the miracle of freedom. But there is also much to regret--racism, intolerance, the destruction of our environment, the reality and the legacy of slavery. In this long, sustained consideration of the state we find ourselves in, Ben Okri invokes the past to explain the present, and sings out a message of hope. The future is still ours to make.

This epic poem, an anthem for the twenty-first century, first appeared in The Times in January 1999. Its message could hardly be more relevant to our present condition. Discover this revised edition of an inspiring and extraordinarily tender work.

The narrator of The Famished Road is a spirit-child who exists between life and death, destined to an endless cycle of death and rebirth. But this time, born with a smile on his face, Azaro begins to fall in love with life and to rebel against his fate. The story the child tells flows between the difficulties of the land of the living and the carefree world of spirits. Okri infuses a vivid portrait of an unnamed West African country with the rich traditions of African mythology and the result is a powerfully haunting masterpiece.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.