And so we move onto The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida –
our book for April. The author Shehan Karunatilaka made a splash a decade ago with his debut
novel Chinaman.
Winning author Shehan Karunatilaka
His
Booker winning satire, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, returns to 1980s
Sri Lanka featuring Maali, an itinerant photographer who loves
his trusted Nikon camera; a gambler, a gay man and an atheist -
and at the
start of the novel, he wakes up dead.
Thinking he has swallowed ‘silly pills’ given to him by a friend,
he soon realizes he really is dead, and locked into an underworld. Other souls surround
him, with dismembered limbs and blood-stained clothes; innocent victims of the violence
that plagued Sri Lanka in the 80s, including a Tamil university lecturer who
was gunned down for criticising militant separatist group the Tamil Tigers.
‘Beneath the literary flourishes is a true and terrifying
reality: the carnage of Sri Lanka’s civil wars. Karunatilaka has done artistic
justice to a terrible period in his country’s history.’ Tomiwa
Owolade, Guardian
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