Topical and timely, Booker Prize–winning author Ben Okri’s new collection of short stories blurs parallel realities and walks the line between darkness and magic.
A Library Journal Best Book of 2021
“No matter how different each story is in context or story line, Prayer for the Living is not simply a collection of different tales, it is a deliberate assemblage of universal truths that explores what it means to seek and to live.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
Playful, frightening, shocking—these stories from a writer at the height of his power will make you think, or make you laugh. Sometimes they’ll make you want to look away, but they will always hold your gaze.
These are stories set in London, in Byzantium, in the ghetto, in the Andes, and in a printer’s shop in Lagos. Characters include a murderer, a writer, a detective, a woman in a dream, a man in a mirror, a little girl, a prison door, and the author himself.
Each one of these twenty-four stories will make you wonder if what you see in the world can really be all there is . . .
Boko Haram (1)
Prayer for the Living
An Inca Elegy
A Sinister Perfection
Ancient Ties of Karma
Dreaming of Byzantium
The Canopy
In the Ghetto
Hail
Mysteries
Tulips
The Lie
Boko Haram (2)
The Master's Mirror
The Standeruppers
Alternative Realities Are True
The Story in the Next Room
The Overtaker
Raft
The Secret History of a Door
The Offering
Don Ki-Otah and the Ambiguity of Reading
Boko Haram (3)
A Street