Reading Order
Seven KillingsA Brief History of Seven Killings Reading Order
Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) is a standalone novel about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in December 1976 Kingston, Jamaica, told through more than seventy voices — gunmen, politicians, CIA operatives, journalists, drug dealers, and ghosts — across three decades from the 1970s to the 1990s. Winner of the Man Booker Prize, the longest and most formally ambitious novel in the Caribbean literary tradition.
Where to start
A Brief History of Seven Killings
Complete Seven Killings Book List
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A Brief History of Seven Killings
Marlon James·2014·The complete novel. Entirely standalone. - Buy
The Book of Night Women
OptionalMarlon James·2009·Lilith, a slave woman on a Jamaican plantation in the early 1800s, drawn into a rebellion — James's second novel; a direct precursor to A Brief History in its Caribbean setting, its engagement with violence, and its modified Creole English narrative voice; shorter and in some ways more accessible than A Brief History. - Buy
Black Leopard, Red Wolf
OptionalMarlon James·2019·Tracker, a man with a superhuman ability to smell, hunting a missing boy through a mythological African landscape — James's first fantasy novel and the first volume of a planned trilogy; for readers interested in his range beyond the Caribbean historical fiction that established his reputation.
Seven Killings — Frequently Asked Questions
Why does A Brief History of Seven Killings have so many narrators?
A Brief History of Seven Killings uses more than seventy distinct narrative voices across its 700 pages because James's subject — the political violence of 1970s Kingston and its long aftermath — cannot be adequately represented by any single perspective. The attempted assassination of Bob Marley (who is never named in the novel, referred to only as 'the Singer') was produced by a convergence of Jamaican gang politics, Cold War CIA activity, the political rivalry between the PNP and JLP parties, the economics of the international drug trade, and the culture of West Kingston's ghettoes; no single witness could see all of these simultaneously, and no single voice could carry the authority to speak for all of them. James has cited William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and its multiple narrators as an influence on the structural choice; the result is a novel that functions like a mosaic or a cubist painting, requiring the reader to build a full picture from the partial perspectives of many different voices.
Is A Brief History of Seven Killings about Bob Marley?
Bob Marley is the organizing absence of A Brief History of Seven Killings — the figure around whom the novel's action is organized — but he is never named and appears only briefly, at the moment of the assassination attempt. The novel is about everyone else: the gunmen who carry out the attack and their complex relationships to the Kingston gangs and the political parties that sponsor them; the CIA operative who is involved in the political context of the attack; the Jamaican journalist who is trying to understand what happened; the American woman who encounters the gunmen in New York in the 1980s as the drug trade expands; the gang members themselves and their experience of Kingston, New York, and the international drug economy. In this sense the novel is less about Marley as a person than about the world that produced the attack on him — the intersection of Jamaican politics, American Cold War policy, and the economics of the cocaine trade that shaped the Caribbean in the second half of the twentieth century.
How difficult is A Brief History of Seven Killings to read?
A Brief History of Seven Killings is demanding: it is very long, it has many characters whose relationships must be tracked across decades, its Jamaican Creole dialogue requires some adjustment, and its portrait of violence is unflinching. Readers who come to it prepared for these demands typically find it extraordinarily rewarding; readers who come to it expecting a conventional historical novel about Bob Marley are sometimes overwhelmed. The most useful preparation is to accept from the beginning that the novel will not explain itself — that some voices will be hard to place at first, that the relationships between characters will become clear slowly, and that the experience of reading it is intended to be somewhat like the experience of arriving in 1970s Kingston without context and trying to understand what is happening. The reward for persisting is a novel of genuine greatness: a work that makes the political and social history of the Caribbean in the late twentieth century viscerally present in a way that no nonfiction account has achieved.
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