The seven moons of Maali Almeida A novel

Shehan Karunatilaka

Book - 2023

"A searing satire set amid the mayhem of the Sri Lankan civil war. Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida--war photographer, gambler, and closet queen--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. In a country 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 contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to the photos that will rock Sri Lanka. Ten years after his prize-winning novel Chinaman established him as one of ...Sri Lanka's foremost authors, Shehan Karunatilaka is back with a "thrilling satire" (Economist) and rip-roaring state-of-the-nation epic that offers equal parts mordant wit and disturbing, profound truths"--

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FICTION/Karunatilaka, Shehan
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Subjects
Genres
Fiction
History
Novels
Historical fiction
Published
New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company 2023.
Language
English
Main Author
Shehan Karunatilaka (author)
Edition
First American edition
Item Description
"First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Sort Of Books"--Title page verso.
Physical Description
388 pages ; 22 cm
Awards
Winner of the Booker Prize, 2022
ISBN
9781324064824
Contents unavailable.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A murdered Sri Lankan photojournalist strives to put his afterlife to good use. Karunatilaka's rich, engrossing second novel, the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, opens with its title character in a post-mortem waiting room in 1990. There, he's informed that he has seven moons (i.e., nights) to remain on Earth as a ghost before entering the Light and the next life. He could head Light-ward right away, but Maali has too many unanswered questions. How was he killed? Who killed him? What has happened to his lover, Dilan, and his best friend, Jaki? And can he somehow tip them off to the location of photos he shot that reveal the depths of the war-torn island's atrocities? With that setup, Karunatilaka's novel is at once a murder mystery and a historical novel of the island nation's violent struggles throughout the '80s. That necessitates explaining a host of ethnic and political factions, plus outside forces from India to the United States, on top of which Karunatilaka layers a host of otherworldly ghouls, demons, and spirits that Maali has to navigate. But despite that complexity, the novel reads smoothly and powerfully, buoyed by Maali's defiant and flawed persona--his weeklong stint as a dead man means reckoning with his sexual promiscuity, gambling habit, and unsettled family as much as the riots and state-sponsored death squads he's strived to expose. Though the novel is maximalist in its plotting, it's intimate in the telling--Karunatilaka writes in the second person to better root the reader in a maelstrom of characters and otherworldly incidents. And the main point gets across: The world is sick with violence and corruption, but truth will out, and the possibility for change exists if we don't succumb to defeatism. A manic, witty, artfully imagined tale of speaking truth to power. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.