This book is both captivating and deeply disturbing. At the same time it is both violent and witty. Sri Lankan author Shenan Karunatilaka paints a vivid portrait of a civil war-torn Sri Lanka where government death squads are murdering people and dumping their bodies in the lake of the capitol city.

The story revolves around Maali Almeida a war photographer that has documented some of the most brutal scenes in recent Sri Lankan history. The story begins with Maali Almeida dead and given seven moons before he needs to choose to move towards the Light. During these seven days, Maali tries to help his friends to find his negatives of unpublished photos that will reveal the brutality and the government officials that are responsible. While doing so, he encounters a world filled with the ghosts of people who had been tortured and murdered. ( )

Reason read: Booker TBR takedown
This is a 2022 novel by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka (Sri Lanken/British). This book won the Booker in 2022. I listened to the audio through Hoopla Digital and it was excellently narrated. The description of the book is "searing satire set amid the mayhem of Sri Lankan civil war. The story is told by dead Maali Almeida, a photographer who sets out to solve the mystery of his own death and is given one week ("seven moons") during which he can travel between the afterlife and the real world. The death of Maali is gradually reviewed over the seven days and I thought this was an interesting way to learn about the civil war in Sri Lankan though it is not the only thing that is revealed. A good portion of this story looks at life of a gay man in a country that does not condone homosexuality.

I think the book did deserve to win a prize. It is an imaginative and well developed plot line. I don't generally like books with so much sexual content but this also is well done.

Because this story takes place in the afterlife, there is a great deal of what I suppose can be called magical realism or fantasy. ( )

Maali Almeida is a photojournalist, a gambler, and a closeted gay man in 1980s Sri Lanka. The novel begins with his death and his arrival in a state in-between life and the afterlife that is essentially a bureaucratic office space (shades of Beetlejuice). Maali has seven moons (on week) to settle his affairs on Earth before moving on to a stage of forgetting. As a war photojournalist he's taken photos documenting the atrocities of the Sri Lankan Civil War that he desperately wants released to the public so that it might end the violence.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a grim and darkly comic novel that satirizes Sri Lankan politics. It also relates the life of it's protagonist in flashback, curiously written in second person so that the reader identifies with Maali. Not knowing anything about the Sri Lankan Civil is definitely a challenge for me reading this book, although learning new things is one of the purposes of reading. It's also a strange and complicated story, but it does make for an interesting story of a specific place and time, with some magical realism for added measure. ( )

An unusual and interesting novel, full of exuberance, that sent me off on many tangential research dives, as I’m prone to do. I thought I knew a fair little bit about Sri Lanka but had never heard of the JVP communist insurgency in the late 1980s, so I was mistaken! I’d have liked it even more if it didn’t violate its own central titular rule - that a spirit has seven moons (days) to enter the light. Instead it went like:

Moon 1: You have seven days, Maali!
Moon 3: in this moon we encounter the alarming phrase “for the next few days” and it seems the passage of time in this moon has to be around a week or so actually
Moon 5: You only have two more days, Maali!

Eh, what’s going on here. Internal consistency may not be the novel’s strong suit, which is too bad as I’m pretty fond of internal consistency in a novel, but it does have much else going for it. ( )

This was a worthy winner of the Booker which I really enjoyed. It starts with the narrator dead and in the endless admin of the afterlife, wanting to figure out what happened to him and how to communicate with the living. Gradually we get the tale of what happened to him, along with a hefty dose of Sri Lankan history and magic realism and ghosts. There is a lot going on but its really vivid and entertaining to read. ( )