Novel
The Famished Road
Ben Okri · 1991
Synopsis
Azaro is a spirit-child, one of those who promise before being born to leave again straight away. He chooses to stay, and his companions from the world before come looking for him relentlessly. He grows up in a poor neighbourhood where his father unloads sacks at the market and fights at night under an assumed name, where his mother sells by the roadside, and where Madame Koto's bar grows bigger as the parties hand out rice before the elections.
Context
The novel appeared in London in March 1991, five hundred pages long, and won that same year the highest British literary distinction, for an author who was thirty-two. It opens a trilogy continued by two volumes, in 1993 and in 1998, and is not its author's first book, who had published a novel as early as 1980. Critics have seen in it less a borrowing from Latin American magic realism than a return to the themes and structures of Yoruba mythology.
Who it is for
A long, dense novel with a floating narration. One must accept that spirits and the living share the same plane, without explanation.
Prizes and reception
Booker Prize in 1991, which made its author one of the youngest winners of the prize; translated into some thirty languages, and the first volume of a trilogy.