Ben Okri

Booker prize-winning author Ben Okri comes to Bath with his new novel, Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken Hearted. His latest novel is a modern fable about love, power, and our many selves — past and future, public and private. Sir Ben Okri is a poet, novelist, playwright and film script writer who was the youngest writer to win a Booker Prize for the first of his trilogy, The Famished Road. His novel Astonishing the Gods was one of the BBC’s 100 novels which have shaped our world.

About Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken Hearted
On the 20th anniversary of the day her first husband left her, Viv decides to host an unconventional party for those who, like her, who have been burned by love. She ropes in her reluctant second husband, invites their friends Beatrice and Stephen, and books the famous fortune teller Madame Sosostris for her masquerade. In a sacred wood in the south of France, the partygoers disguise themselves and wait eagerly for the great clairvoyant, but the night soon goes awry in a comically revealing way that causes the couples to question their relationships and the direction of their lives.