The Famished Road

The Famished Road is a novel by the Nigerian writer Ben Okri, published in London by Jonathan Cape in 1991. It won the Booker Prize that year, which made Okri, at thirty-two, the youngest winner of the award.

Its narrator is Azaro, an abiku or spirit child who lives in an unnamed African city, most probably Nigerian, and who exists in the spirit world as well as in the world of people. Abiku children are believed to come and go between the two, and Azaro's decision to stay alive and with his parents is what the book is built on.

The novel follows the family through poverty and political upheaval, and it holds the spirit world and the material one together rather than treating one as a device for explaining the other, which is why it has been described as animist realism as well as fantasy. Okri wrote the first draft while he was living in a rented flat, and he continued the story in two later books, Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches.