Dangerous Love - by Ben Okri (Paperback)

About the Book

"Originally published in the United Kingdom by Phoenix House, an imprint of Orion Books, in 1996; paperback reprint edition published in 2014 by Head of Zeus, Ltd."--Title page verso.

Book Synopsis

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Famished Road, a classic story of doomed love in a country trying to come to terms with its violent past.

An epic of daily life, Dangerous Love is one of Ben Okri's most accessible and most disarming novels.
Omovo is an office worker and artist who lives at home with his father and his father's second wife. In the communal world of the compound in which he lives, Omovo has both friends and enemies, but his most important relationship is with Ifeyiwa, a beautiful young married woman whom he loves with an almost hopeless passion--not because she doesn't return his love, but because they can never be together.
Against the backdrop of Nigeria's civil war, Ben Okri creates an atmosphere where passion takes on a wholly different dimension as danger, greed, hunger, and betrayal loom at every turn.

Review Quotes

"Even the minor characters in Dangerous Love are fully realized--you know them intimately and are drawn to them with an intensity that has nothing to do with virtues or flaws but with the specific beauty and ugliness of individual souls inside bodies. Like an alchemist, Okri has channeled the 'ancient, unyielding' forces through a reordering of 'familiar images, ' creating something universal at a time when the idea of the universal has long been thought impossible." --New York Times Book Review

"Sublime...Okri's beautiful prose has the cadence of poetry and a singular voice...this stands as one of Okri's most powerful and accessible works." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Had me enchanted from the first page to the last." --Sunday Telegraph

"Poetic writing of a very high order...tender, nightmarish, wise, and soulful." --Daily Telegraph

"Intelligent and moving." --The Spectator

"Even early in his career, Okri wrote devastating passages about the horrors of war...chilling in their effectiveness...readers will bask in the opportunity to watch a great writer's development." --Shelf Awareness

About the Author

Ben Okri is a playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, short-story writer, anthologist, and aphorist. He has also written film scripts. His works have won numerous national and international prizes, including the Booker Prize for Fiction. His books include the eco-fable Every Leaf a Hallelujah, the play Changing Destiny, the genre-bending climate fiction Tiger Work, the poetry collections A Fire in My Head and Mental Fight, and the novels Astonishing the Gods, The Last Gift of the Master Artists, and Dangerous Love. In 2023 he received a knighthood for services to literature.