Shehan Karunatilaka is a Sri Lankan writer whose first book,
Chinaman, won the Commonwealth Book Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Gratiaen Prize, and was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize.
Chats with the Dead is his second book.
Published in the UK as The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida | Longlisted for Booker Prize 2022
Who is Malinda Albert Kabalana? How did he die?
Renegade war photographer Maali Almeida has to solve his own murder. Does that sound fun? It would be if there wasn't so much bloody red-tape to get through. Oh and it's not as though anyone alive actually seems to miss him, and it certainly doesn't help that his girlfriend is related to his boyfriend. Worst of all, it's all those goddamn memories of war, constantly interrupted by the overly chatty dead folks breezing through the afterlife. Besides, he's so busy solving his ethical dilemmas that there's barely any time to solve a murder-even if it's his own.
A compulsively readable dark comedy of life-death and everything in between-Chats with the Dead searingly exposes the plight of a country caught in the aftermath of civil war. Its deliciously compelling absurdity holds you in thrall right from the very first page up to its startling denouement, constantly upending its own premise with its staggering humanity.
Shehan Karunatilaka has delivered a classic whodunit with a brilliant twist.
Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka returns with a crackling whodunit a decade after his debutKarunatilaka's tone is almost in the vein of his literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut, combining the funny and the dreadful in a bleak, black wayAmid its dark comedy, Karunatilaka's second novel, set in Sri Lanka in 1989, also asks profound questions about deatha thriller that contains within its pages both the absurdity of life and death and all that keeps hovering somewhere in the in-between
