Brief History of Seven Killings (James)

A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel
Marlon James, 2014
Penguin Group (USA)
704 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594486005


Summary
Winner, 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. (From the publisher.)