Prayer for the Living

Okri is always good company and these 20-odd tales showcase his lucid prose and freewheeling imagination * Mail on Sunday *
Okri is a master of the genre: these fables are concise and otherworldly. Resplendent and lingering, they capture an ethereal plane between wakefulness and sleep with a skewed, dreamlike brutality and beauty... Okri's magnificent twilight zone provides a surreal and unique insight' * The Lady *
Okri is a master storyteller * Herald *
The reader is in no doubt they are in the hands of a master storyteller throughout * Belfast Telegraph *
Timeous, shocking and perceptive * TimesLIVE (South Africa) *
An air of magic hovers over many of the tales... What really makes a tale, Okri shows, is how it is told' * New Statesman *
How much you'll enjoy these Zeitgeisty global gobbets depends whether you accept platitudes as undervalued truths and whether you rate moral relativism a blessing or a blight. Either way, they're food for thought * Country Life *
A series of fables that make the reader question the nature of reality and whether what one sees in the world can really be all there is... The often magical elements in the stories that play with the imagination' * Irish Examiner *
That's the adventure and thrill of Okri's collection: you never know which shock­ing end or mystical place he will take you to next. Within each story, Okri takes us on a journey across worlds that are only accessible in dreams and moments before death... Prayer for the Living creates beauty in the empty spaces, and the confusing lines between reality and myth. His stories rarely assert moral truths, but when they do, they're often spelled out in riddles. Regardless of where Ben Okri takes his readers, he does so with a steady, confident hand, even in ambiguity' * Locus Magazine *