A Brief History of Seven Killings

Um, Douglas Stuart's John of John is on the longlist, and he's the author of Shuggie Bain, which is a, a much decorated debut novel of his.

Uh, Marlon James is on there again for his new novel, The Disappearers, and of course, he is a previous winner of the Booker Prize with A Brief History of Seven Killings.

And Elizabeth Strout is nominated for the third time for The Things We Never Say.

But I suppose it's controversial because of who's not on the longlist, and notably Mag- Maggie O'Farrell, uh, for Land.

And when they're not making movie magic, it turns out Josh and Anne are still taking a page from each other's books.

Do you know who Marlon James is? He wrote a book called The History of Seven Killings.

There's a follow-up that I just picked up, and I haven't really started reading it yet, but I just picked it up, and I'm excited to read it because everybody says it's a genius book, but I know nothing about it yet.

The Disappears? Yeah, I just picked it up.

My guest grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, and nearly gave up writing altogether after his first novel was rejected 78 times.

He went on to become the first Jamaican writer to win the Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings and followed it with the African fantasy novels Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King.

Now he's back in Jamaica with The Disappearers, which has received rave reviews and has just been shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize.

The novel begins in Kingston in 1988 with... where eight gay men come together to rehearse John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes, a groundbreaking play about sex, identity and power inside a men's prison.

So I cut the first 20 pages and the last 20 pages.

Nobody's ever complained.

Oh, that was John Crowe's devil, right? Tell me where a brief history of seven killings, which of course won the Booker, where did that begin for you?

That began for me in 1991 when I just left college.

Exactly.

And the perfect example of this is A Brief History of Seven Killings published in 2014.

Now, the source text focuses purely on the book's title and its staggering contents, so that is exactly what we will do.

Right.

Whether we are wading into the heavy, fatalistic generational Greek tragedy of Mystic River or, you know, marveling at the quiet coming of age nature writing in the dangerous stillness in Where the Crawdads Sing.

Yeah.

Whether we are squirming at the deeply cynical structural critique of modern marriage in Gone Girl or being completely swept away by the raw, multivocal historical symphony of A Brief History of Seven Killings, the true magic, the architectural foundation that makes these books endure lies entirely in the prose.

Absolutely.

But if you're gay, you know that Jamaica has long been known as probably the most dangerously homophobic country on earth.

That reality forms the backdrop to The Disappearers, the blazing new novel by Marlon James, the gay Jamaican writer who won the 2015 Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings, and will probably win again for this one.

Giving us, as one character says, the Jamaica underneath the Jamaica we know, this fiercely personal book doesn't merely tell a story.

It carries you off like a tidal wave.

He is just not a novella writer, Marlon Jay.

And the previous book that he won for A Brief History of Seven Killings was also, I mean, it's pretty bloody and it was also pretty big.

Interestingly, he went off after writing that previous book, A Winner, to write much more sort of supernaturally...

It was fantasy, wasn't it?

[upbeat music]

Marlon James' new novel follows a group of gay men trying to build lives and survive amid the deep homophobia of Jamaica in the 1980s and '90s.

The New York Times has called the novel, "The novel of the decade, and possibly of the century thus far." Our senior arts correspondent, Jeffrey Brown, spoke with James in his first television interview about the book, which was just shortlisted for the Booker Prize yesterday.

It's part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

I write to fill in the blanks, um, even if the blanks are in my own life.

On a recent morning in his Brooklyn neighborhood, Marlon James recalled scenes from his life and those of other gay men in the Jamaica of his youth, living in fear, hiding their truest selves, experiences he used to write his new novel, The Disappearers.

A disappearer is somebody who figures out how to vanish in a very public space.

People we stop talking about, people we no longer see or notice.