Dangerous Love (49 page)

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.

O
N
D
ANGEROUS
L
OVE

‘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

O
N
A
STONISHING THE
G
ODS

‘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

O
N
A W
AY OF
B
EING
F
REE

‘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

O
N
I
N
A
RCADIA

‘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

B
EN
O
KRI
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.

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.

I
n 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

The Age of Magic

Other essays

Birds of Heaven

A Time for New Dreams

Poetry

An African Elegy

Mental Fight

Wild

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