The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

WINNER OF THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE

A searing satire set amid the murderous mayhem of Sri Lanka beset by civil war

Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet gay, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time when scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts who cluster around him can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka. Ten years after his prizewinning novel Chinaman established him as one of Sri Lanka's foremost authors, Karunatilaka is back with a rip-roaring epic, full of mordant wit and disturbing truths.

What the judges particularly admired and enjoyed in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was the ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques.The South Asian epic we have been waiting for for a decade. Riotous, funny and heartbreaking. It stays with you long after you have finished reading it.The wild horses of Shehan Karunatilaka's imagination run fast, wild and true.Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka returns with a crackling whodunit a decade after his debut.Karunatilaka's tone is almost in the vein of his literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut, combining the funny and the dreadful in a bleak, black way.Impressive . . . a tighter expression of his distinctive prose and an even more glaring mirror of Sri Lanka.A big, brash beast of a novel, epic in scale and inventiveness. Shifting back and forth in tone from riotous to devastating, it is simultaneously a thrilling murder mystery, a razor-sharp indictment of Sri Lankan politics and society, and most intuitively, a morbidly funny yet perceptive rumination on mortality and what comes after death.