Ben Okri’s beautifully written and moving novel combines fantasy and the vision of a child, the supernatural and the here-and-now to convey Nigerian peasant life in a changing world. It is the most ambitious as well as one of the most fully realised of the year’s novels. It brings a distinctively black African way of writing and seeing things into the mainstream of European fiction. ‘ Jeremy Treglowan, Chairman of the Booker Prize judges 1991.