MAY 2021 - AudioFile
In a sober voice, Ben Okri narrates his collection of short stories, which take place in a variety of international locales. A well-known Nigerian writer, Okri is a dramatic narrator, as befits the wide range of works he performs. Whether he’s portraying characters based in London or Lagos, he is an excellent storyteller, both in oral and written forms. With 23 options, listeners can dip in and out of the table of contents or listen to the stories in order. Either way, the result is quality entertainment. From detective stories to satire, Okri delivers each work with elegance. Those who enjoy literary fiction will find this audiobook an enjoyable experience. M.R. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
11/16/2020
Booker-winner Okri (The Freedom Artist) delivers a sprawling collection that spans continents, centuries, and the border between the real and the supernatural. Told in alternating flash fictions and longer works, the stories all evoke the cadence of origin myths and oral history. There are modern-day fables like “In the Ghetto,” which features a life lesson taught by a father to his sons after their car breaks down and no one helps them, and “A Sinister Perfection,” in which a child’s dollhouse has real-world ramifications in the vein of the classic W.W. Jacob story “The Monkey’s Paw.” Others offer vivid portraits of a real and troubled world: three stories titled “Boko Haram” follow the terrorist group, and others take place in war-torn landscapes or on boats attempting to carry refugees across the Mediterranean, such as the brief “Raft”: “There were men in the water clinging to the raft and wearing life jackets.... The women and children were in the sea, and the sea was in the raft.” These visceral, brief depictions of violence and fear are the most powerful of the collection. This is as an essential reminder of the timeless and vital nature of storytelling. (Feb.)
Shelf Awareness for Readers
"Writing across countries, citizens, centuries, Okri effortlessly showcases his literary fluency. Even beyond specific details of time and place, global audiences will discover resonating enlightenment and entertainment between these taut pages."
|Los Angeles Times
"[Okri’s] new story collection, Prayer for the Living, spans the globe."
From the Publisher
"Ben Okri has a fantastic imagination. Reading the collection is similar to turning a glass snow globe and watching several dozen flakes each descending differently. He’s not creating magical realism as much as redefining it...Okri's passion for the written word had my heart soaring."
—Woven Tale Press
"A career-spanning story collection from the Booker Prize–winning Nigerian writer that navigates the blurry line between dream and reality...'Alternative Realities Are True' is a dimension-warping detective story worthy of Philip K. Dick, and 'Don Ki-Otah and the Ambiguity of Reading' is a Don Quixote satire whose metafictional gamesmanship evokes Borges and Achebe...Okri skillfully embeds abstract ideas in concrete, engaging storytelling...Mind-bending and provocative."
—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED Review
"Booker Prize–winning poet and novelist Okri creates a dreamlike atmosphere in one store, whipsaws the reader into a horrifying triptych about Boko Haram in the next, and then calms with unexpectedly gentle humor. There is something to entice or challenge every reader in this eclectic repertoire.”
—Library Journal, STARRED Review
"Writing across countries, citizens, centuries, Okri effortlessly showcases his literary fluency. Even beyond specific details of time and place, global audiences will discover resonating enlightenment and entertainment between these taut pages."
—Shelf Awareness for Readers
"Booker-winner Okri delivers a sprawling collection that spans continents, centuries, and the border between the real and the supernatural...This is as an essential reminder of the timeless and vital nature of storytelling."
—Publishers Weekly
One of BuzzFeed’s Most Anticipated Books of 2021
"Okri is always good company and these twenty-odd tales showcase his lucid prose and freewheeling imagination. The settings range from the Andes to Nigeria, and the common thread is that what you see is only part of the story...A literary magic-carpet ride of shimmering beauty."
—Daily Mail (UK)
A Library Journal top story collection for Fall 2020
"Booker Prize winner Ben Okri's short stories in Prayer for the Living are timeous, shocking, and perceptive."
—Sunday Times (South Africa)
"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 (UK)
"The reader is in no doubt they are in the hands of a master storyteller throughout."
—Belfast Telegraph
"An air of magic hovers over many of the tales...What really makes a tale, Okri shows, is how it is told."
—New Statesman
"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."
—Irish Examiner
"Polyphonic or cacophonous as you choose, [these stories] read as if liberated from a single worldview, yet are mindful of many...They're food for thought."
—Country Life (UK)
Library Journal
★ 01/01/2021
Penetrating Okri's mind is like tumbling down a rabbit hole, a mesmerizing trip into a landscape of bemusement and ambiguity, where time exists on multiple planes. In fact, one story about a detective investigating a crime that has not yet been committed is aptly titled "Alternative Realities Are True," which could be the theme for this collection of tales and fables involving miniature houses, a cursed door from Newgate prison, and a mysterious mirror used by Rosicrucian spiritualists. In the devastating title piece, the narrator searches for family in the ruins left by rampaging soldiers, the agony of the survivors starkly contrasting with the hauntingly joyful songs emanating from the souls of the dead. And in the exquisite "Byzantium," a man's imagined idyll in Istanbul feels more lifelike than his reality, particularly when, at the Blue Mosque, he leans a hand against a stone pillar and senses a oneness with every being who came before. VERDICT Booker Prize-winning poet and novelist Okri (The Famished Road) creates a dreamlike atmosphere in one story, whipsaws the reader into a horrifying triptych about Boko Haram in the next, and then calms with unexpectedly gentle humor. There is something to entice or challenge every reader in this eclectic repertoire.—Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
MAY 2021 - AudioFile
In a sober voice, Ben Okri narrates his collection of short stories, which take place in a variety of international locales. A well-known Nigerian writer, Okri is a dramatic narrator, as befits the wide range of works he performs. Whether he’s portraying characters based in London or Lagos, he is an excellent storyteller, both in oral and written forms. With 23 options, listeners can dip in and out of the table of contents or listen to the stories in order. Either way, the result is quality entertainment. From detective stories to satire, Okri delivers each work with elegance. Those who enjoy literary fiction will find this audiobook an enjoyable experience. M.R. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-10-14
A career-spanning story collection from the Booker Prize–winning Nigerian writer that navigates the blurry line between dream and reality.
Okri’s stories are so concerned with myth and folklore, and so comfortable in the style of those genres, that his best ones sometimes feel as if written on parchment or chiseled in granite. In the eerie, allegorical title story, a man searching for his loved ones in a town devastated by soldiers finds a kind of collective solidarity with the corpses he discovers: “All the faces are familiar. Death has made them all my kin.” “A Sinister Perfection” features a dollhouse that seems to have the power to make (usually bad) things happen in reality. The narrator of “Dreaming of Byzantium” finds himself in Istanbul, uncertain of how he got there or of the woman he shares his hotel bed with; his journey becomes a study in how “unreality makes reality.” Okri's stories propose a kind of existential balancing act: If we err when we place too much faith in reality, we can also too easily succumb to delusion. “The Lie,” for instance, is a fable about a king who sends his minions out to discover universal truths only to face an uncomfortable one about himself: “Your power is unreal. It is made of air. It consists of what we have conferred on you.” The stories don't always strive for timelessness: Three tales concern the African terrorist group Boko Haram. Nor is the mysticism always somber: “Alternative Realities Are True” is a dimension-warping detective story worthy of Philip K. Dick, and “Don Ki-Otah and the Ambiguity of Reading” is a Don Quixote satire whose metafictional gamesmanship evokes Borges and Achebe. Okri often plays with form, as in two stories written in a flash-fiction style he calls “stoku," a portmanteau of story and haiku. But throughout, Okri skillfully embeds abstract ideas in concrete, engaging storytelling.
A diverse yet consistent collection, mind-bending and provocative in a host of styles and milieus.
