The Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Award - Fiction At Its Finest!

Finally, the last installment of my previous two blogs regarding the 2015 Man Booker Prize. First the long list, then, the short list and now, the winner is named and it is A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James published by Oneworld. The 44-year-old, now resident in Minneapolis, is the first Jamaican author to win the prize in its 47-year history. This is also the first win for the independent publisher, Oneworld Publications. We own a hardcover copy as well as an electronic copy. Marlon James also wrote John Crow's Devil (2005) which we own and The Book of Night Women (2009) which can be loaned from one of our partner libraries.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a masterfully written modern epic that explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the late 1970's. In December 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. He left the country the next day and did not return for two years. Spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters' assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and 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 seventies, to the crack wars in New York in the eighties, to a radically altered Jamaica in the nineties.

Michael Wood, Chair of the judges, commented as follows:
"This book is startling in its range of voices and registers, running from the patois of the street posse to The Book of Revelation. It is a representation of political times and places, from the CIA intervention in Jamaica to the early years of crack gangs in New York and Miami."

"It is a crime novel that moves beyond the world of crime and takes us deep into a recent history we know far too little about. It moves at a terrific pace and will come to be seen as a classic of our times."

I am looking forward to reading this book. Hope I've piqued your interest as well.