“The most original novel I’ve read in years…Astonishingly brilliant, it transported me back to the 1970s Jamaica of Michael Manley’s PNP, and the attempted assassination of Bob Marley by a cabal of Kingston gangsters and the CIA. It’s a vivid plunge into a crazed, violent and corrupt world, told through multiple narrators and executed with swaggering aplomb. On the downside, opening any book after this will be a little anticlimactic.” – Irvine Welsh
Unflinching in his examinations of race, violence, and sexism in the US and Jamaica, Marlon James illuminates dark and uncomfortable truths with wisdom, grace, and humanity. The New York Times Book Review praised his novel The Book of Night Woman as “Beautifully written and devastating writing in the spirit of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker but in a style all his own, James has conducted an experiment in how to write the unspeakable—even the unthinkable.”
In his spellbinding new novel A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS centers on the people involved in the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976, but spins outward to encompass a breathtaking array of voices: gang members, CIA agents, a Rolling Stone reporter, girlfriends, politicians, drug dealers, the children of the Kingston ghettos, even ghosts. This vast range of characters and dialects allows James to conjure all the individual lives touched by not only Marley’s assassination attempt, but by the sweeping US-Jamaica interchange of music, drugs, sex, violence and political machinations during the 1970s.
Written with depth, insight, authenticity and a mesmerizing mix of tenderness and startling brutality, A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS is a dazzling achievement by a writer of enormous power.
Marlon James was born in Jamaica, in 1970. He is the author of A Brief History of Seven Killings and The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. James lives in Minneapolis.
