A Brief History of Seven Killings (Booker Prize Winner)

shindig, Daddy-O, see those cool cats on the mat? They could never dig it, and there s nothing to do but wait for the man that killed me, but he won t die, he only gets older and older and trades out wives for younger and younger and breeding a whole brood of slow-witted boys and running the country down into the ground.

Dead people never stop talking and sometimes the living hear. Sometimes he talks back if I catch him right as his eyes start to flicker in his sleep, talks until his wife slaps him. But I d rather listen to the longer dead. I see men in split breeches and bloody longcoats and they talk, but blood comes out of their mouths and good heavens that slave rebellion was such ghastly business and that queen has of course been of bloody awful use ever since the West India Company began their rather shoddy decline compared to the East and why are there so many negroes taking to sleeping so unsoundly wherever they see fit and confound it all I seem to have misplaced the left half of my face. To be dead is to understand that dead is not gone, you re in the flatness of the deadlands. Time doesn t stop. You watch it move but you are still, like a painting with a Mona Lisa smile. In this space a three-hundred-year-old slit throat and two-minute-old crib death is the same.

If you don t watch how you sleep, you ll find yourself the way the living found you. Me, I m lying on the floor, my head a smashed pumpkin with my right leg twisted behind the back and my two arms bent in a way that arms aren t supposed to bend and from high up, from the balcony I look like a dead spider. I am up there and down here and from up there I see myself the way my killer saw me. The dead relive a motion, an action, a scream and they re there again just like that, the train that never stopped running until it ran off the

opening up this terrible moment in the life of a great musician. He gives us the streets, the people, especially the desperate, the Jamaicans whom Marley exhorted to: Open your eyes and look within:/ Are you satisfied with the life your living?
The Boston Globe
 
Thrilling, ambitious Both intense and epic.
Los Angeles Times
 
A prismatic story of gang violence and Cold War politics in a turbulent post-independence Jamaica.
The New Yorker
 
I highly recommend you pick [A Brief History of Seven Killings] up. As a book of many narrators, this novel reminds me of Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives.
NPR, All Things Considered
 
An impressive feat of storytelling: raw, uncompromising, panoramic yet meticulously detailed. The Jamaica portrayed here is one many people have heard songs about but have never seen rendered in such arresting specificity and if they have, only briefly.
Chicago Tribune
 
A sweeping novel that touches on family, friendship, celebrity, art, sexuality, ghetto politics, geopolitics, drug trade, gender, race and more, sending the reader from Jamaica to New York via Miami and Cuba and back.
Newsweek
 
Like a capacious 19th-century novel crossed with a paranoid Don DeLillo conspiracy-theory thriller the book rewards time spent, bringing a complex perspective on violence, corruption, and the untidiness of humanity to vivid life and astonishing detail. It makes you want to rush out and read everything else James has written.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
The way James uses language is amazing .Vigorous, intricate and captivating, A Brief History of Seven Killings is hard to put down.
Ebony  
 
A gripping tale in which music, drugs, sex, and violence collide with explosive results.
Bustle
 
James s masterful novel radiates; [it s] a character-driven tale that takes place in a maelstrom of guns, drugs and politics.
Playboy
 
Brilliantly executed The novel makes no compromises, but is cruelly and consummately a work of art.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune