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In the decade since it won the Booker Prize, Ben Okri's Famished Road has become a classic. Like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, it combines brilliant narrative technique with a fresh vision to create an essential work of world literature.
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.
Ben Okri
Ben Okri is a Booker Prize-winning novelist, as well as an acclaimed essayist, poet, and playwright. His books have been translated into twenty-eight languages and he has won numerous international prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and the Chianti Ruffi no-Antico Fattore.
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