BEN OKRI (b.1959)
Infinite Riches. London: Phoenix House, 1998.
First edition of the final book in the trilogy which began with Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road (1991), augmented by the author with over 1000 words of marginal annotations. Infinite Riches sees the trilogy’s spirit child, Azaro, in a world of tension and crisis as his father is wrongfully imprisoned and his mother is roused in the fight for justice. Okri’s annotations provide an important reflection on the development of the trilogy and the distinct style of this final instalment: ‘Each one of the trilogy is different, part of the continuum, but written to stand alone, independent, yet part of the whole. And this one represents true maturity, the nearly old age, of the spirit child spirit. How can you be old while still a child?’. Alongside numerous pencil drawings, he describes the tropes that appear across his writing, his environmental concerns, the place of music and poetry in the novel, and urges the reader at the beginning of the novel to ‘Read slowly’, and at the end, ‘And then dream’.

Octavo. Original red cloth, spine lettered in gilt, pictorial dust jacket.

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