Omovo, a Nigerian office-worker and artist who lives at home with his father and his father’s second wife. In the 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.
Reviews
ON DANGEROUS LOVE
‘Okri’s masterpiece to date… solid, convincing and classical.’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Poetic writing of a very high order… tender, nightmarish, wise and soulful tragedy.’
Daily Telegraph
‘One comes to inhabit it as one reads… A reason for constant celebration.’
Scotland on Sunday
‘One of the world’s finest writers… A life-affirming, lyrical book.’
Options
‘A tough, ecstatic book.’
Independent on Sunday
‘No other contemporary author captures the ephemeral with as much success. Okri should easily pass the hundred year test.’
The Good Book Guide
‘Intelligent and moving.’
Spectator
‘The rippling, translucent style is deliberately pared down to tell a simple, memorable narrative of ambiguous love and disaster.’
Mail on Sunday
ON ASTONISHING THE GODS
‘A modern-day classic.’
Evening Standard
‘Amazing… This is as close as you can get to reliving the experience of a bedtime story.’
Guardian
‘Powerful, sensuous and philosophical.’
European
‘Graceful and enigmatic… Exciting, like a trip into a de Chirico landscape.’
Daily Telegraph
‘A new creation myth… a beautiful book… its mere task to make the impossible possible.’
Scotsman
‘A rare achievement… Fulfills Calvino’s prescription for lightness – being like a bird, rather than a feather… an impressive, brave, and often beautiful little book.’
New Statesman
ON A WAY OF BEING FREE
‘Okri imbues these essays with a writer’s insight… And he does so in an inimitably sinuous yet abstract style well suited to his theme… oblique, oneiric, rhapsodic, elliptical.’
Independent on Sunday
‘There can be no mistaking Okri’s passion and intelligence.’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Okri is marvellously enthusiastic at promoting the poetic cause, pouring out his love for creativity in “The Joys of Storytelling” with a passionate reverence.’
Daily Express
‘Thoughtful, concise, cultivated and clear.’
Scotland on Sunday
‘Okri is at once as foreign and as British as Joseph Conrad.’
Daily Telegraph
ON IN ARCADIA
‘Incantatory beauty. Profound and enchanting.’
The Times
‘A charm and magic that is bright and striking and angry.’
Irish Times
‘Mixing a densely metaphysical approach with a delightfully lyrical style… a truly fascinating work, and a hugely ambitious one too.’
Scotland on Sunday
‘The shaman of modern British fiction.’
Independent
‘You cannot fault Okri for confronting the big issues and asking questions of our secular age that few of his contemporaries have the innocence and bravery to attempt.’
The Observer
‘Arresting and evocative.’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Okri has chosen a big and bold subject and a highly original approach to it.’
Herald
‘The journey has inspired writers from Homer to Chaucer onwards… Okri gives it an ultra-modern twist.’
Daily Mail
‘A riddling quest for enlightenment.’
Independent
About the Author
BEN OKRI has published many books, including The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1991. His work has been translated into 26 languages and has won numerous international prizes including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the Chianti Ruffino Antico Fattore International Literary Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour Prize.
The recipient of many honorary doctorates, he is a vice-president of the English Centre of International PEN and was presented with the Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum for his outstanding contribution to the Arts and cross-cultural understanding in 1995.
He has been a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge and is an honorary fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1997, he was awarded an OBE in 2001.
He was born in Nigeria, and lives in London.
Also by this Author
Fiction
The Age of Magic
‘The Age of Magic has begun.
Unveil your eyes.’
Eight weary film-makers, travelling 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 travellers 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 is available here.
Astonishing the Gods
A young man is transported to an enchanted isle in a quest to discover the secrets of visibility.
He finds himself amidst a society of invisible beings who have built a utopia based on a single law, ‘Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully for the first time.’
Astonishing the Gods is available here.
In Arcadia
A group of angry and ill-assorted people accept an invitation to make a journey. Inspired by a painting and financed by a mysterious benefactor, they set off to discover the real Arcadia. Or what remains of it.
Their journey begins in ignorance and chaos at Waterloo station and takes them through superstition and myth to harmony. In the Louvre, in front of Poussin’s masterpiece, they begin to understand.
In Arcadia is available here.
Essays
A Way of Being Free
Twelve of Ben Okri’s most controversial non-fiction pieces form this collection on the theme of freedom, ranging from the personal to the analytical, including a meditation on the role of the poet, a study of Picasso’s Minotaur, a paean to human freedom in honour of Salman Rushdie, and an appraisal of fellow-Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. Lyrically imaginative and provocative, A Way of Being Free confirms Okri’s place as one of the most inspiring of contemporary writers.
A Way of Being Free is available here.
Other Fiction
Flowers and Shadows
The Landscapes Within
Incidents at the Shrine
Stars of the New Curfew
The Famished Road
Songs of Enchantment
Infinite Riches
Starbook
Tales of Freedom
Other essays
Birds of Heaven
A Time for New Dreams
Poetry
An African Elegy
Mental Fight
Wild
A Letter from the Publisher
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HeadofZeusBooks
The story starts here.
First published in the UK in 1996 by Phoenix House.
This edition first published by Penguin Books (SouthAfrica) (Pty) Ltd, 2011.
This eBook edition first published in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd.
Copyright © Ben Okri, 1996
Jacket design: Leo Nickolls
The moral right of Ben Okri to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (PB) 9781784082543
ISBN (E) 9781784081867
Head of Zeus Ltd
Clerkenwell House
45-47 Clerkenwell Green
London EC1R 0HT
www.headofzeus.com
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Message from Chinua Achebe
Dedication
Introduction to the new edition
Epigraph
Book 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Book 2
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Book 3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Book 4
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Book 5
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Ben Okri on the Reissues
Preview
Author’s Note
About this Book
Reviews
About the Author
Also by this Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright