This winter, 4 fantasy novels portend doom — but offer delights

“The Last Gift of the Master Artists” by Ben Okri

I handed in this review column a tad late, because I got sucked into reading “The Last Gift of the Master Artists” (Other Press) by Ben Okri, and it’s not a book you can rush through. (Okri even exhorts the reader on the very first page to “Read slowly.”)

Okri, a Booker Prize-winning novelist, originally published “Last Gift” in 2007 under the title “Starbook” — but now he’s substantially revised it, he says, because critics missed the central role of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery in the narrative. The result is one of the most beautiful and profound novels I’ve read in ages. It also packs an unsettling punch, tracing a mystical love story between a prince and a maiden from a secret tribe of magical artists whose world is about to be destroyed by a menace they can’t yet understand.

It’s easy to get lost in Okri’s fable, which weaves the intimate with the communal and is full of mystical revelations — both protagonists suffer a kind of death and are reborn, and both of them come to a greater self-knowledge, which, we’re told, is “better than being a king.” And yet a creeping sense of dread also suffuses the novel, as a vision of people in chains, first revealed in a mysterious nightmare-inducing sculpture, eats away at everything. Okri never dwells on the horror of slavery itself — instead, he makes us fall in love with the world it’s about to destroy.

“Even Though I Knew the End” by C.L. Polk.

“Sign Here” by Claudia Lux

“The Sunbearer Trials” by Aiden Thomas

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