Prayer for the Living: Stories

Ben Okri

Jul 2025 · Akashic Books

About this ebook

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 . . .

About the author

BEN OKRI was born in Minna, Nigeria. His childhood was divided between Nigeria, where he saw firsthand the consequences of war, and London. He won the Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road, and his novel Astonishing the Gods was selected as one of the BBC's "100 Novels That Shaped Our World." His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. He also writes plays and screenplays. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a vice president of English PEN, and has been awarded the OBE as well as numerous international prizes and honorary doctorates. His latest novel, The Freedom Artist, was published by Akashic Books. Prayer for the Living is his latest short story collection.