The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
by Shehan Karunatilaka
Summary
Maali Almeida wakes up dead. He is a war photographer, a gambler and a closeted gay man in Colombo in 1990, and he cannot remember who killed him, which in Sri Lanka, then beset by civil war and insurgency, is a question with an inconveniently long list of candidates.
He finds himself in what appears to be a celestial visa office, badly run and heavily bureaucratic, and is told he has seven moons to settle his affairs before moving on. What he wants is to lead the two people he loves to a hidden box of photographs that would embarrass everyone: the government, the Tigers, the Indian peacekeepers, the foreign press.
Karunatilaka writes it in the second person and at speed, mixing ghost story, detective novel and political satire, and it is extremely funny about things that are not funny at all. The afterlife is overcrowded with the recently murdered, all of them arguing.
The difficulty is real: the cast is enormous, the acronyms of the conflict come at you unexplained, and the second person takes some acclimatising. Give it fifty pages and stop trying to hold every name. What survives is a furious, generous book about a country that has agreed not to count its dead, written by someone who counts them anyway.
It helps to know roughly who was fighting whom in Sri Lanka in 1990, though Karunatilaka's point is partly that nobody could keep track even at the time. Come for the voice, which is one of the most propulsive in recent fiction, and stay for a ghost story that turns out to be an argument about memory and impunity.
Historical Context & Significance
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won the Booker Prize in 2022, Shehan Karunatilaka's second novel and the second by a Sri Lankan writer to take the prize, after Michael Ondaatje.
The judges called it a whodunnit and a race against time, full of ghosts, gags and a deep humanity. Neil MacGregor, chairing a panel that included Shahidha Bari, Helen Castor, M. John Harrison and Alain Mabanckou, described it as an afterlife noir that dissolves the boundaries not just between genres but between life and death, body and spirit, east and west.
The book had a difficult route to publication. An earlier version appeared in South Asia under a different title and was substantially rewritten before the edition that won, and Karunatilaka has spoken about the risk of writing satirically about a conflict whose participants are still in public life.