Stars of the New Curfew
Author(s): Ben Okri
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.
General Information
- :
- : Vintage
- : Vintage
- : 0.154
- : 04 August 1999
- : United Kingdom
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Ben Okri
- : Paperback
- : 823.914
- : 208
More About The Product
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" Time Out "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" Observer "In a few brief sentences Ben Okri captures the arrogance and faceless indifference of the military forces which patrol the margins of these stories" Independent "Stamped with the ease of a truly original imagination" -- Wole Soyinka
Ben Okri's books have won several awards including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the prestigious International Literary Prize Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore 1993. The Famished Road won the Booker Prize in 1991. He was born in Minna, Nigeria.
