A group of world-weary travellers, a mysterious Swiss mountain village and a haunted world - Booker Prize-winner Ben Okri takes readers on a magical journey with unexpected, poetic and metaphysical revelations in his new novel.
"The Age of Magic" is about the tightly-knit group of eight filmmakers, travelling from Paris to Basel, who arrive at a small Swiss hotel on the shores of a luminous lake. Above them, strewn with lights that twinkle in the darkness, looms the towering Rigi mountain.
Over the course of three days and two nights, the travellers find themselves drawn in to the mystery of the mountain reflected in the lake. One by one, get disturbed, enlightened, and transformed, each in a different way.
Unknown to themselves they carry a lot of unwanted baggage - fear, anger, jealousy, love and as they discover the haunted world, they are confronted with demons they have been trying to escape. An intoxicating and dreamlike tale unfolds as Okri offers a different way of reading.
Included are puzzles by Mary Higgins Clark, Isaac Asimov, and Ngaio Marsh; uncanny tales in the tradition of A Christmas Carol by Peter Lovesey and Max Allan Collins; O. Henry-like stories by Stanley Ellin and Joseph Shearing, stories by pulp icons John D. MacDonald and Damon Runyon; comic gems from Donald E. Westlake and John Mortimer; and many, many more.
Readers can find almost any kind of mystery they are in the mood for - suspense, pure detection, humour, cozy, private eye, or police procedural in the book published by Head of Zeus and distributed by Penguin Books India.
Nigeria-born Okri won the Booker Prize for "The Famished Road" in 1991. His work has been translated into 26 languages and has won numerous international prizes including the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Africa, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the Chianti Ruffino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour Prize.
