A Brief History of Seven Killings

A Brief History of Seven Killings is Marlon James's 2014 novel, the Booker Prize winner that made James the first Jamaican-born writer ever to win and the most structurally ambitious novel from the Caribbean in a generation. The opening event is the December 3, 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley at his home in Kingston (referred to in the novel only as "the Singer"); the novel follows the aftermath across the next fifteen years through Kingston gang wars, CIA Jamaica station operations, Miami crack-era money flows, and New York DEA arrests. The narrative voice rotates across more than seventy first-person speakers (gang leaders, sex workers, CIA agents, journalists, ghosts) over 686 pages.

James's project is to write a Caribbean novel at the structural scale of Roberto Bolano's 2666 or William Gaddis's J R, and the book pulls it off. The seventy-voice multi-perspective architecture is the book's defining innovation and the part that has earned the comparisons to Faulkner that some early reviewers reached for. The Bam-Bam (a fourteen-year-old gunman) and Demus chapters are some of the most carefully written prose about the operational mechanics of Kingston-era political violence. The Nina Burgess (a Jamaican woman trying to leave Kingston for New York) thread that runs across the entire novel is the structural emotional anchor.

Recommended as required twenty-first century Caribbean and post-colonial literary fiction reading, as the right James entry point, and as one of the canonical world-novels of the contemporary era. Read the Dark Star trilogy (Black Leopard, Red Wolf; Moon Witch, Spider King) next. The Robertson Dean / Cherise Boothe / Dwight Bacquie / Robert Younger / Ryan Anderson / Johnathan McClain audiobook (a full-cast production) is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.