A Brief History of Seven Killings cover

A Brief History of Seven Killings

by Marlon James

The night someone tried to kill Bob Marley.

For you if

you want Jamaica's political violence told by the people inside it not the people reporting on it

⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡

Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.

Buy New on Bookshop.org

Supports independent bookstores

— OR —

Find Used on Better World Books

Secondhand & sustainable

$19 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.

1976. Someone shoots Bob Marley two days before a peace concert in Kingston. James uses that moment as the entry point into a novel that spans thirty years and dozens of voices — gang members, CIA operatives, journalists, ghosts, drug mules in New York. The original Jamaican title was going to be A Brief History of Seven Killings because seven people died that night. The novel that resulted is 700 pages of polyphonic fury — Jamaica's political history told from inside the garrison communities the politicians armed and abandoned. Won the Booker Prize. The most ambitious Caribbean novel ever written.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
Jamaica • Caribbean
Voice
Written by a Jamaican author

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Bacurau poster

Bacurau(2019)

dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles

A town disappears from the map. Then the hunt begins.

Days after burying its matriarch, a small town in Brazil's rural sertão vanishes from every map, its water supply is cut, and a group of wealthy foreign mercenaries arrives to hunt its residents for sport — only to discover Bacurau has no intention of dying quietly.

Why it’s here: Punk in turning class rage into genre carnage — a marginalized town doesn't wait for institutions to save it, it arms itself and fights back on its own terms. Pedagogical in showing how disappearing a place from official maps is itself a form of violence, before a single shot is fired.

Letterboxd ↗

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb poster

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb(1964)

dir. Stanley Kubrick

Laughing so you don't scream, since 1964.

A rogue Air Force general triggers an unrecallable nuclear strike on the USSR, and the War Room scrambles — bureaucratically, absurdly — to stop the end of the world.

Why it’s here: The original 'laugh so you don't scream' text — mutually assured destruction played entirely for farce, and the farce is the argument: absurdity is what nuclear brinkmanship actually looks like from the inside.

Letterboxd ↗