A Brief History of Seven Killings

Winner of the Booker Prize 2015
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction 2015
Winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (Fiction) 2015
Winner of the Green Carnation Prize 2015
Winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Novel & Short Story 2015
Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2016
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction 2014
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2015
Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award 2015

From the acclaimed author of The Book of Night Women comes a masterfully written novel that explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the late 1970s.

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.