The Famished Road

Azaro is an abiku, a spirit child, one of those who are born to die and be born again, and who broke his pact with his companions in the other world by choosing to stay. He lives with his father, a labourer who carries loads at the market and takes up boxing under the name Black Tyger, and his mother, who hawks goods by the roadside, in a compound in a Nigerian city on the edge of independence. The road outside is being built and never finishes. Azaro moves without transition between the world of rent and hunger and political thugs handing out poisoned milk, and a world of spirits who follow him through the market with three heads and no feet, trying to call him home. Madame Koto's bar sits at the junction of both. Okri writes in a shimmering, accumulating prose that refuses to separate the two orders of reality, because for the people in the compound they are not separate, and the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor are as fantastical as anything in the forest. It is a novel about endurance, and about a country perpetually about to be born.