It’s a literary victory for Marlon James.
The Jamaican-born author just won the Man Booker Prize, one of the highest honors in literary fiction, for his novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, reports the New York Times.
The 680-page book uses the real-life attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 as a Trojan Horse to uncover the crime, drug trafficking and political corruption plaguing the country during that time period.
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“I kept running into dead ends with the stories until a friend of mine said, ‘Why do you think it’s one story,” James said at the awards ceremony, explaining his inspiration for the 75+ narrators who help tell the story.
Though laden with curse words, book critics have praised the epic for its brutal honesty and unpredictability.
“It’s a visceral and uncompromising novel that sheds a stark light on a profoundly disturbing chapter of Jamaica’s history,” book critic Jonathan Ruppin told BBC, “but it’s also an ingeniously structured feat of storytelling that draws the reader in with its eye-catching use of language.”