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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Oct 2014, 704 pages
Paperback:
Sep 2015, 784 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Poornima Apte
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Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Brilliantly inventive and stunningly ambitious, this novel is a revealing modern epic spanning Kingston in the '70s, the crack wars in '80s New York, and a radically altered Jamaica in the '90s.
Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize.
On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert, gunmen stormed his house, machine guns blazing. The attack nearly killed the Reggae superstar, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Marley would go on to perform at the free concert on December 5, but he left the country the next day, not to return for two years.
Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters - assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts - A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the '70s, to the crack wars in '80s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the '90s. Brilliantly inventive and stunningly ambitious, this novel is a revealing modern epic that will secure Marlon James' place among the great literary talents of his generation.
Sir Arthur George Jennings
Listen. Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not death at all, just a detention after school. You know where you're coming from and you're always returning from it. You know where you're going though you never seem to get there and you're just dead. Dead. It sounds final but it's a word missing an ing. You come across men longer dead than you, walking all the time though heading nowhere and you listen to them howl and hiss because we're all spirits or we think we are all spirits but we're all just dead. Spirits that slip inside other spirits. Sometimes a woman slips inside a man and wails like the memory of making love. They moan and keen loud but it comes through the window like a whistle or a whisper under the bed, and little children think there's a monster. The dead love lying under the living for three reasons. (1) We're lying most of the time. (2) Under the bed looks like the top of a coffin...
Booker Prize
2015
One of the many strengths of Seven Killings is its resolute insistence on authenticity. It is obvious that James has no patience for tired cliches about Jamaica (you won’t find the word mon here, except as ironic device). It’s perhaps one of the reasons the narrative is equipped with such a diversity of voices and points of view. Piece them all together and you get something entirely breathtaking and maybe, just maybe, a glimpse of truth...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting
A Brief History of Seven Killings is an amazing novel of power, corruption and lies. I can't think of a better one I've read this century. Russell Banks
This novel cracks open a world that needs to be known. It has epic reach and achieves it. It's scary and lyrically beautiful - you'll want to read whole pages aloud to strangers.A Brief History of Seven Killings chronicles the rise of a Jamaican drug gang in the United States. This fictional organization seems to be loosely modeled after the real-life Shower Posse, a violent Jamaican gang linked with numerous killings, with strongholds in large American cities such as New York and Miami.
The origins of the gang date back to the early '60s, when Edward Seaga, a Jamaican politician belonging to the country's conservative Jamaican Labor Party (JLP) decided to embark on a project of urban renewal in the capital city of Kingston. It created a separate community called Tivoli Gardens. Citizens sympathetic to Seaga were housed in the new buildings, while many residents were forcibly evicted. To maintain ...
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