Description

Explore the extraordinary imagination of Booker Prize-winner and visionary author Ben Okri – one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature.

Hearts will be healed and hearts broken, but no one will leave this festival as they arrived…

Viv has turned heartbreak into spectacle: a one-night-only masked festival at a French chateau, marking the anniversary of her first husband’s departure. Guests roam the moonlit woods in search of reinvention, all waiting for Madame Sosostris, the elusive clairvoyant of The Waste Land, rumoured to appear after decades in hiding.

But as midnight nears, disguises slip, emotions ignite and Viv’s carefully planned celebration begins to unravel.

Enchanting and unsettling, this midsummer tale explores love, illusion and the strange transformations of a single night.

‘[A] whimsical tale of transformation… magic is essential, and Okri can spin it.’ Guardian
‘Full of rich hallucinatory imagery and enjoyably vibrant symbolism’ Irish Times

Publisher Review

[Okri’s] writing takes on the great riddles of existence – freedom and consciousness, truth and illusion, suffering and transcendence – spinning them into shimmering, allegorical texts * New York Times * A writer who refuses to stop asking the hardest questions * Observer * Okri can distil language to its essence… his sentences have a careful simplicity, but not at the expense of eloquent writing’ * Financial Times * Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence * Independent on Sunday * Ben Okri is that rare thing, a literary and social visionary, a writer for whom all three – literature, culture and vision – are profoundly interwoven — Ali Smith Okri’s writing has a light-as-air elegance * New Statesman * Fiction’s master enchanter — Ben Okri