Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Madame Sosostris & The Festival for the Broken-Hearted by Ben Okri, read by Phyllida Nash.

What do you do when your heart has been made a wasteland by love?

Viv, who’s in the House of Lords, had the idea for the festival on the twentieth anniversary of the day her first husband left her. Six months later, crowds descend on the grounds of a dreamlike chateau in the South of France, avidly awaiting the experience of a lifetime, Viv’s inaugural Festival for the Broken-Hearted.

Everyone is in fancy dress. No one knows who anyone is. They wander the beautiful woods with just one night to change everything. And to crown it all, a very special guest is expected: world-renowned clairvoyant and fortune-teller Madame Sosostris, known as the wisest woman in Europe, and not seen since the pages of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. She will attend for one night only.

But will she actually appear at all, or will Viv’s carefully orchestrated festival fall to pieces? Will Viv and her husband make it through the night? Will anyone else?

Part vision, part mystery, this story of a midsummer night’s madness is also an homage to Eliot's famous poem, in Ben Okri’s inimitable style, as alive with echoes and reverberations as the enchanted forest itself. Think Ingmar Bergman meets William Shakespeare, with a dash of Mozart.

Hearts will be healed, and hearts broken, but nobody will leave this festival exactly as they arrived.

Critics Review

[Okri’s] writing takes on the great riddles of existence – freedom and consciousness, truth and illusion, suffering and transcendence – spinning them into shimmering, allegorical texts
New York Times
A writer who refuses to stop asking the hardest questions
New York Times
Okri can distil language to its essence... his sentences have a careful simplicity, but not at the expense of eloquent writing’
Financial Times
Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence
Independent on Sunday
Ben Okri is that rare thing, a literary and social visionary, a writer for whom all three – literature, culture and vision – are profoundly interwoven
Ali Smith
Okri’s writing has a light-as-air elegance
New Statesman
[A] whimsical tale of transformation... magic is essential, and Okri can spin it.
The Guardian
Heaps of witty dialogue and wordplay on romance and breakups... there’s plenty in here for Shakespeare heads too
Shortlist
There is as much healing as there is heartache in this beautiful book
NB Magazine
Fiction's master enchanter
Marlon James
Booker Prize-winning Okri has incredible range... Here, he is in a playful yet contemplative mode as he uses a fantastical party in the woods in the south of France, with masks, costumes, music and a famous fortune teller, to examine two couples that might or might not be in crisis... with heaps of witty dialogue and wordplay on romance and breakups, the popularity of tarot, yoga and astrology and the one thing every character is obsessed with: the future.
ShortList
Full of rich hallucinatory imagery and enjoyably vibrant symbolism.
Irish Times
What a brilliant idea! A fancy-dress ball for the lovelorn in the enchanted grounds of a château in the sunny South of France, with the famous clairvoyant Madame Sosostris to read the tarot. What could possibly go wrong? A whimsical tribute to T S Eliot's masterpiece The Waste Land, with sparkling dialogue, mystery, magic and some rocky marriages.
Saga
An enchanting story of a masked ball…leading to delightfully theatrical twists and a satisfying resolution…Shakespeare lovers should flock to this.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The dialogue here grants a shimmery surface to the allegorical underpinning. It helps, too, that the novel’s conundrum couldn’t be realer: Can we ever avoid unhappiness? This beautifully written book is riveting in its attempt to answer that question, from first page to last.
LitHub
A dizzying masquerade where little is as it appears to be…By combining the fantastical elements of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with allusions to T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ Okri creates a world that feels lush while exposing the barren landscapes—both physical and emotional—of modern humanity.
Shelf Awareness

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