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

"[A] literary and social visionary" -- Ali Smith "These are beautiful stories but they bite" New Statesman "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" Evening Standard

Ben Okri has published 9 novels, various volumes of short stories and essays, as well as two collections of poetry, African Elegy and Mental Fight. His work has been translated into more than 20 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 Internatonal PEN and was presented with a Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. He was born in Nigeria and lives in London. He won the Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road.