Book excerpt: To enter the world of Ben Okri's stories is to surrender to a new reality. Set in the chaotic streets of Lagos and the jungle heart of Nigeria, all the laws of cause and effect, fact and fiction, are suspended. It is a world where the lives of the powerless veer terrifyingly close to nightmare. In rich, lyrical, almost hallucinatory prose Ben Okri guides us through the fabulous and the mundane, the serene and the randomly violent. The unrelenting Nigerian heat and the implacable darkness of the black-out and the military curfew are the backdrops for his characters each finding their own ways to survive. We witness their dogged resistance to impotence, their unquenchable humour and their insistence on the possibility of love in the face of terror. Written with the lucid clarity and logic of dream, Stars of the New Curfew is a book of visionary imagination.