The second book in the trilogy which began with the Booker prize-winning The Famished Road.

'A love story and an account of the conflict between the parties of the Rich and Poor... Okri's voice is all his own' Independent

Having outwitted death, Azaro, the spirit child, remains in the land of the Living. Oppression and violence continue to plague the city, and while political factions battle, bar owner Madame Koto backs the 'Party of the Rich' with magical, bewitching force. But for Azaro, his adventure is tied up with his parents, and so his story takes on yet another heroic adventure to save them both from the forces of the world.

'Ben Okri writes beautifully...a triumph of inspiration over the everyday' The Times

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE

So long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use

The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. He is born into a world of poverty, ignorance and injustice, but Azaro awakens with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story. Despite belonging to a spirit world made of enchantment, where there is no suffering, Azaro chooses to stay in the land of the Living: to feel it, endure it, know it and love it. This is his story.

In a magnificent feat of sustained imaginative writing, Okri spins a tale that is epic and intimate at the same time. The Famished Road rekindled my sense of wonder. It made me, at age 50, look at the world through the wide eyes of a child Michael Palin

*** NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ***

""In my dreams, I saw a city fall into the sea. I heard the cries of thousands. I saw flames that outshone the lamps of heaven. And all the world was shaken...""

At the novel's centre: the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, hero, leader, irresistible force, irrepressible spirit, battling (and ultimately reconciling with) a strange otherworldly form that has taken possession of his undead body and soul. This ancient and mysterious power and unearthly spirit of vampire lore has all the force, history and insidious reach of the unknowable Universe.

It is through this spirit, previously considered benign for thousands of vampire years and throughout the Vampire Chronicles, that we come to be told the hypnotic tale of a great sea power of ancient times; a mysterious heaven on earth situated on a boundless continent -- and of how and why this force came to build and rule the great legendary empire of centuries ago that thrived in the Atlantic Ocean.

And as we learn of the mighty powers of this lost kingdom of Atalantaya, the lost realms of Atlantis, we come to understand its secrets, and how and why the vampire Lestat, indeed all the vampires, must reckon so many millennia later with the terrifying force of this ageless, all-powerful Atalantaya spirit.

**DREAM COUNT, the searing new bestselling novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is out now!**

THE WOMENS PRIZE FOR FICTION WINNER OF WINNERS

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'

A literary masterpiece DAILY MAIL

An immense achievement OBSERVER

In 1960s Nigeria, three lives intersect. Ugwu works as a houseboy for a university professor. Olanna has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic lover, the lecturer. And Richard, a shy Englishman, is in thrall to Olannas enigmatic twin sister. Amongst the horror of Nigerias civil war, loyalties are tested as they are pulled apart and thrown together in ways none of them imagined.

Winner of the Womens Prize for Fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies masterpiece is a novel about race, class and the end of colonialism  and the ways in which love can complicate everything.

A gorgeous, pitiless account of love, violence and betrayal TIME

Vividly written, thrumming with life  a remarkable novel JOYCE CAROL OATES

Adichie entwines love and politics to a degree rarely achieved by novelists ELLE

John Self is a consumer extraordinaire.

Rolling between London and New York he closes movie deals and spends feverishly, all the while grabbing everything he can to sate his massive appetites: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography and mountains of junk food.

But Johns excesses havent gone unnoted. Menaced by a phone stalker, his high-wire, hoggish lifestyle is about to bring him face-to-face with the secret of his success.

'Terribly, terminally funny: laughter in the dark, if ever I heard it' Guardian