Product Description

As one of Britain's foremost poets, Ben Okri is rightly acclaimed for his use of language. And as a Booker Prize winning novelist, this skill was shown to particular effect in both "Starbook" (his most recent work) and in "The Famished Road". In "Tales of Freedom" he brings both poetry and story together in a fascinating new form, using writing and image pared down to their essentials, where haiku and story meet. Thus we discover Pinprop, the slave to an old couple lost in a clearing, who holds the keys to the universe in his quirky hands. Then there is the beautifully dressed black Russian on the train, helping to film a new version of "Eugene Onegin". Later, in the chaos of the aftermath of war, orphaned children paint mysterious shapes of bulls, birds, hybrid creatures, and we wonder if grief has unhinged them into genius...And who is that woman, who hardly speaks, who presses a tiny flower into the palm of the young boy on the bus, and then leaves his life forever?"Tales of Freedom" offers a haunting necklace of images which flash and sparkle as the light shines on them. Quick and stimulating to read, but slowly burning in the memory, they offer a different, more transcendent way of looking at our extreme, gritty world - and show the wealth of freedom that's available beyond the confines of our usual perceptions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #290308 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

About the Author
Ben Okri has published 8 novels, including The Famished Road and Starbook, as well as collections of poetry, short stories and essays. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been awarded the OBE as well as numerous international prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore. He is a Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN and was presented with a Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. He was born in Nigeria and lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The bus drove past telegraph poles in meadows of blue. In the bus, on that beautiful Italian day, there were boys returning from school, and working men. The bus came to a stop. A woman with several men came on. She was a young woman who carried herself gracefully. One of the boys helped her into the bus and gave up his window seat to her. She had an exquisite complexion, clear eyes, and uncanny composure. The boy, called Reggio, made friendly conversation with the young woman. The men she was with regarded Reggio with suspicion. He was just a boy, coming home from school, and he meant nothing by it. He was drawn by the mystery of the young woman, who sat impassively, staring straight ahead, as if she were dead, or going to die.

Her face, or, rather, her eyes lit up only when the boy spoke to her and asked questions, to which answers were not necessary. The questions were not necessary either, but life would be duller if he hadn't asked them.

`Do you like those hills?'

`Yes.'

`Do you like that cloud?'

`Yes.'

`Do you like that horse in the field?'

`Yes.'

`Do you like that car going past us?'

`No.'

`Do you like this bus?'

`Yes.'

`Do you like school?'

She paused. Her face clouded a little.

Then she gave a tiny smile, like a snowdrop, and said:

`Yes.'

The boy was silent for a while. He was not thinking of any new questions, but just turning over in his mind the clarity of her answers. Somehow, darkly, he found he deduced a great deal from her slender answers, but he wasn't sure what. Decorum made him silent for longer, but the strangeness of her answers made him want to know more.