The Freedom Artist

By: Ben Okri

Narrated by: Ben Okri

In a world uncomfortably like our own, a young woman called Amalantis is arrested for asking a question. Her question is this: Who is the Prisoner?

When Amalantis disappears, her lover Karnak goes looking for her. He searches desperately at first, then with a growing realization that to find Amalantis, he must first understand the meaning of her question.

Karnak's search leads him into a terrifying world of deception, oppression, and fear at the heart of which lies the prison. Then Karnak discovers that he is not the only one looking for the truth.

The Freedom Artist is an impassioned plea for justice and a penetrating examination of how freedom is threatened in a post-truth society. In Ben Okri's most significant novel since the Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road, he delivers a powerful and haunting call to arms.

(P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

The sexism though

I couldn’t finish. Okri’s progressiveness is celebrated, but I cannot stomach when writers disproportionately (and in this novel, exclusively) describe female characters’ physical appearance dichotomously: either beautiful or not beautiful (meaning fat, in one example from this book). It’s a subtle but distracting thread than runs through the narrative and undermined the critical message.

Readers who enjoy impressionistic, surreal, dreamscapes would otherwise enjoy the prose. Needless to say, the book does service to the weighty topics of censorship and consciousness.