A Brief History of Seven Killings
by Marlon James
Summary
In December 1976, two days before a free concert intended to calm Jamaica's election violence, seven gunmen walked into Bob Marley's house on Hope Road and shot him. He survived. Nobody was ever convicted. Marlon James takes that hole in the record and fills it with voices.
There are more than seventy five characters and over a dozen narrators, and the novel runs from 1976 to 1991, out of Kingston's political ghettos and into the crack trade in New York and Miami. A CIA officer, a Rolling Stone journalist, a gang enforcer, a woman who slept with the singer once and spends the rest of her life outrunning it, and a dead politician who narrates from the afterlife. Marley himself is never named. He is only ever the Singer.
James writes it almost entirely in voice, and the voices are the reason to read it: patois, prison Jamaican, American reporter, Cold War bureaucrat, each rendered so completely that you always know who is speaking without being told.
This is a demanding book. It is nearly seven hundred pages, extremely violent, and the first hundred pages ask you to hold a cast list you have not been given. Use the character list at the front, do not try to memorise anyone, and let the pattern assemble. Readers who get through it tend to describe it as the most alive novel they have read in years.
Best for readers who loved the sprawl of David Peace or the polyphony of Faulkner, and a poor choice for anyone who wants a single protagonist to follow.
Historical Context & Significance
A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Booker Prize in 2015, and Marlon James became the first Jamaican writer to take it.
Michael Wood, chairing the judges, called it the most exciting book on the shortlist and singled out the many voices, saying they ran from Jamaican slang to biblical heights. The panel reached a unanimous decision in under two hours, which is unusually fast for a book this divisive.
It had already been a critical success in the United States, taking the American Book Award and the Anisfield Wolf Award for fiction and reaching the National Book Critics Circle shortlist, but the Booker moved it into a different category of attention entirely. James has spoken about the years of rejection that preceded it, including a first novel turned down enough times that he briefly abandoned writing.