The Famished Road
by Ben Okri
A spirit child walks between the living and the dead.
you want Nigerian mythology and Nigerian politics to exist in the same breath
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Azaro is an abiku — a spirit child who keeps choosing to stay in the world of the living rather than return to the spirit world. He moves through a Lagos slum witnessing poverty, political corruption, and supernatural events with equal matter-of-factness. Okri won the Booker Prize for this in 1991. It is the most formally ambitious Nigerian novel — Lagos as a mythological landscape where the dead are always nearby and the road is always hungry. A dispatch that refuses to separate the political from the spiritual.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Nigeria • West Africa
- Voice
- Written by a Nigerian author
- Themes
- After Empire
