Flat lay of 9 Vintage Classics books about mothers and motherhood, against a white textile background.

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Reading lists

9 of our favourite mothers in classic books

With the dawn of a new millennium about to break, the Nineties was a strange, floating decade of positivity, hope and something called the World Wide Web. 

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Books that defined the 1990s

The Famished Road

This is a book to generate apostles. People will be moved and, with stars in their eyes, will pass on the word

Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence. As one startling image follows the next, The Famished Road begins to read like an epic poem that happens to touch down just this side of prose... When I finished the book and went outside, it was as if all the trees of South London had angels sitting in them

In a magnificent feat of sustained imaginative writing, Okri spins a tale that is epic and intimate at the same time. The Famished Road rekindled my sense of wonder. It made me, at age 50, look at the world through the wide eyes of a child

Overwhelming - just buy it for its beauty

The Famished Road is a masterpiece if one ever existed

A brilliant read, unlike anything you have ever read before...the message is universal

It is a rich, provocative and hopeful vision of the world, stuffed full of drama and surprise-its literary lineage - the ease with which spirits move through every day life - is from ancient Greece and medieval romances

Azaro says that his is "a spiritchild nation, one that keeps being reborn and after each birth comes blood and betrayal". There's a glory in that. Azaro's scary, awesome, hallucinated childhood is a piece of sustained invention that turns out to be glorious in its own right, too

Ben Okri has published 8 novels, including The Famished Road, as well as collections of poetry, short stories and essays. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been awarded the OBE as well as numerous international prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore. He is a Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN and was presented with a Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. He was born in Nigeria and lives in London.

Journey between the land of the Living and the spirit world in this magical Booker Prize-winning novel 
 
'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' 
 
 Azaro, is a spirit child, who in many traditions of Nigeria exists between life and death. Born into a difficult world, 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. 
 
'In a magnificent feat of sustained imaginative writing, Okri spins a tale that is epic and intimate at the same time. The Famished Road rekindled my sense of wonder. It made me, at age 50, look at the world through the wide eyes of a child' Michael Palin 
 
'This is a book to generate apostles. People will be moved and, with stars in their eyes, will pass on the word' Time Out 
 
'Ben Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence' Independent on Sunday

Infinite Riches

His most apocalyptic, explosive vision yet

A novel of paradoxes and impossibilities, conceived poetically and carrying readers along as though on a fast-flowing stream...I admire it hugely

A potent combination of political, metaphorical and mythical storytelling...pure celebration

A deliberate and important piece of writing

Okri's writing is hailed for its intelligent, tenderness, poeticism and luminosity

Okri is infinitely rich in imagination... there is a fantastic sense of the magic of Africa and a wonder at its strangeness

FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE FAMISHED ROAD 
 
In the chaotic world of his African city, the spirit child Azaro still watches the tumultous and tender lives of the Living; refusing to return to his realm. With his father now imprisoned for a crime he did not commit and his mother battling for justice, the final chapter of Azaro's epic adventure is an explosive and haunting climax to this masterful trilogy. 
 
'His most apocalyptic, explosive vision yet' Scotsman 
 
'A novel of paradoxes and impossibilities, conceived poetically and carrying readers along as though 
on a fast-flowing stream' Literary Review

Ben Okri (Author) Ben Okri has published 8 novels, including The Famished Road, as well as collections of poetry, short stories and essays. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been awarded the OBE as well as numerous international prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore. He is a Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN and was presented with a Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. He was born in Nigeria and lives in London.

The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. He is born into a world of poverty, ignorance and injustice, but Azaro awakens 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 tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story. 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.

Stars Of The New Curfew

This collection of short stories by Ben Okri brings to life the violence, frustration, humour and beauty of everyday life in Nigeria.

Another piercing collection of short stories... Masterful

There are many novelists who write as well as Ben Okri, many who share his gift for recreating the texture of everyday life, many who can cut through the surface to expose, as he does, the myths of our elders and betters use to keep us in our place. There are very few novelists who can do all three. The fact that Ben Okri has done so in short stories, without ever losing his balance, his humour or his edge, makes his accomplishment all the more exceptional

In a few brief sentences Ben Okri captures the arrogance and faceless indifference of the military forces which patrol the margins of these stories

Stamped with the ease of a truly original imagination

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.

An African Elegy

A potent collection of poems that take us into the heart of Africa by Booker Prize winner, Ben Okri.

Authenticity shines out of these poems in the way it does from some East European and Russian poets

Accessible and affecting... Born of a big spirit that one cannot ignore

A kaleidoscope of tersely condensed implications, with pregnant shifts of mood, tone and meaning brought to bear in the space of each line break... Most of Okri's writing is best understood as poetry, even when not laid out in broken lines

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

Incidents At The Shrine

Booker-Prize winner Ben Okri blends the African oral storytelling tradition with Magical Realism in this mesmerizing collection of short stories.

These are beautiful stories but they bite

Ben Okri...seems to have the two great gifts that are required to make a man a teller of tales: first, faultless artistic economy, which shows in his razor-sharp prose; second, an ability to place himself, chameleon-like in any milieu of society, from the highest to the lowest... Mr. Okri, in short, knows his business

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.

Ben Okri

Triumphant...a joyful and entertaining read

Passages of extraordinary beauty... Okri paints a convincing surrealist picture

Reading Okri felt to me like talking to someone who has a secret

Ben Okri writes beautifully... a triumph of inspiration over the everyday. His prose is dense with pungent metaphor, sometimes whimsical, sometimes bawdy... fraught with wild visions

A love story and an account of the conflict between the parties of the rich and the poor... Okri's voice is all his own

The second book in the trilogy which began with the Booker prize-winning The Famished Road. 
 
'A love story and an account of the conflict between the parties of the Rich and Poor... Okri's voice is all his own' Independent 
 
Having outwitted death, Azaro, the spirit child, remains in the land of the Living. Oppression and violence continue to plague the city, and while political factions battle, bar owner Madame Koto backs the 'Party of the Rich' with magical, bewitching force. But for Azaro, his adventure is tied up with his parents, and so his story takes on yet another heroic adventure to save them both from the forces of the world. 
 
'Ben Okri writes beautifully...a triumph of inspiration over the everyday' The Times

Ben Okri

Books by Ben Okri

Series by Ben Okri

The Famished Road Trilogy

Articles featuring Ben Okri

9 of our favourite mothers in classic books

Books that defined the 1990s

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