The Famished Road

The Famished Road is a novel by the Nigerian writer Ben Okri, published in 1991, narrated by Azaro, a spirit child known in Yoruba tradition as an abiku, who is born into an unnamed African city but, unlike most abiku, chooses to remain in the human world rather than dying young and returning to the spirit realm, despite constant pressure from his fellow spirits to rejoin them. Azaro's account moves fluidly between the ordinary hardships of his parents, a laborer father and a market-trading mother struggling against poverty, and the visions, spirits and supernatural incursions that surround him, blending realist social detail with material drawn from Yoruba mythology and cosmology. Widely read as a political fable about the instability and promise of postcolonial African democracy as much as a personal coming-of-age story, the novel drew comparisons to magic realism on its publication. It won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1991, making Okri, at thirty-two, one of the youngest writers to receive the award, and its themes and title later inspired the Radiohead song Street Spirit (Fade Out).