In the decade since it won the Booker Prize, Ben Okri’s Famished Road has become
a classic. Like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude, it combines brilliant narrative technique with a fresh
vision to create an essential work of world literature.

The narrator, Azaro, is
an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life
and death. The life he foresees for himself and the tale he tells is full of sadness
and tragedy, but inexplicably he is born 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.