SOURCE: "The Forest in the City," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 24, 1989, pp. 3, 13.

The pseudonym of the late Roberta Warrick, Thomas was best known for her fiction and nonfiction writings about Africa, where she spent numerous years working for the Peace Corps. In the following favorable review, Thomas lauds Okri's use of detail, his blending of realism and surrealism, and his focus on West African life in Stars of the New Curfew.

Ben Okri is Nigerian. His collection of six stories, Stars of the New Curfew, is made of Nigeria—heat, rain, car crashes, tyrants, millionaires, raw sewage, zinc huts, soldiers, rubbish mounds, palm wine, ghosts, music, forests. This is not an Africa of travel writers of journalist-fiction: It's an Africa of its own myths, thronged and bewitched.

In style and imagery Okri follows closely in the footsteps of Amos Tutuola, a strange and amazing writer from...