Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series / The Famished Road

from the INTRODUCTION by Vanessa Guignery
 
I felt on the edge of reality. These are the words uttered by the narrator of The Famished Road as he recalls his venturing to a location that looked like a strange fairyland in the real world . The sentence perfectly encapsulates the ambivalent and fragile position of a child whose wanderings take him and the readers of Okri s third novel to a multiplicity of places set in the real or the supernatural realm, or a mixture of both. A child of miracles, who knows no boundaries and observes what surrounds him with eyes wide open, Azaro is our very special guide into Okri s
enchanting and terrifying worlds.
 
In 1991, the publication of The Famished Road marked the emergence of a unique literary voice, that of a writer who was born in 1959 in Minna, a railway town in central Nigeria, nineteen months before his country s independence, lived in London between the ages of one-and-a-half and seven, reluctantly travelled back to Nigeria with his parents and siblings in 1966, and eventually decided to settle in Great Britain at the age of nineteen. While the violence of the Nigeria Biafra war of 1967 70 greatly affected the young boy, life in Lagos sparked his imagination, teaching him that there was no one world-view, but as many worlds as there are ways of seeing . As a teenager, he closely observed his father practising law and taking up the cases of destitute people, which led him to develop a fascination for human beings and more particularly the voiceless and unheard victims of social inequalities. In 1978, he left Nigeria for London, which he considered the home of literature, and two years later published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows, in the Longman Drumbeat series, a showcase for recent African writing. This was followed by The Landscapes Within in 1981 and two collections of short stories (Incidents at the Shrine in 1986 and Stars of the New Curfew in 1988), which prompted Chinua Achebe to name

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 International Literary Prize Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore 1993. The Famished Road won the Booker Prize in 1991. He was born in Minna, Nigeria.

About the Introducer: VANESSA GUIGNERY is Professor of English Literature and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. She is the author of Novelists in the New Millennium.

"A dazzling achievement."
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The New York Times Book Review

"A mesmerizing vision of modern Nigeria, seen through the eyes of a peculiarly sentient child . The Famished Road is a quintessential African novel. The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
A stunning work, suspenseful and haunting, the product of one of the lushest imaginations on record. The Plain Dealer
 
"A masterpiece if one ever existed."
--The Boston Globe

"Dazzling, hypnotic...a true feast for the word hungry."
--San Francisco Chronicle