The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Winner of The Booker Prize 2022
 
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 serene Beira lake and he has no idea who killed him.
 
At a time where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round 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.
 
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'An exuberant whodunnit ...There can't be many novels that simultaneously bring to mind Agatha Christie, Salman Rushdie and John le Carre - but this one does.' - The Times
 
'Recalls the mordant wit and surrealism of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls or Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita ... Karunatilaka has done artistic justice to a terrible period in his country's history' - The Guardian
 
'Brilliant ... rollicking ... a pleasure to read. Karunatilaka writes with tinder-dry wit and an unfaltering ear for prose cadences.' - Kate McLoughlin, The Times Literary Supplement
 
'A brave and brilliantly inventive novel, full of energy, about a mad bad world in a dark time' - Romesh Gunesekera, author of Reef and Monkfish Moon