A Brief History of Seven Killings

Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize

Anisfield-Wolf Fiction Prize

Minnesota Book Award for Fiction

OCM Bocas Fiction Prize for Caribbean Literature

Shortlisted For The Man Booker Prize 2015

Shortlisted For The National Book Critics Circle Award

Selected As A Best Book Of The Year By:
Wired, GQ, Bbc Culture, New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, Washington Post, Electric Literature, Time, Publishers Weekly, Amazon, Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, Houston Chronicle, Library Journal, Bookpage, Popsugar, Buzzfeed, Salon Laura Miller, Kansas City Star, L Magazine, Seattle Times, Boston Globe


JAMAICA, 1976

Seven gunmen storm Bob Marley’s house, machine guns blazing. The reggae superstar survives, but the gunmen are never caught.

From the acclaimed author of The Book of Night Women comes a dazzling display of masterful storytelling exploring this near-mythic event. Spanning three decades and crossing continents, A Brief History of Seven Killings chronicles the lives of a host of unforgettable characters – slum kids, one-night stands, drug lords, girlfriends, gunmen, journalists, and even the CIA.
On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven unnamed gunmen stormed the singer’s house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but rumors abounded regarding the assassins’ fates.
A Brief History of Seven Killings is James’s fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time in Jamaica’s history and beyond. Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters—assassins, drug dealers, journalists, and even ghosts—James brings to life the people who walked the streets of 1970s Kingston, who dominated the crack houses of 1980s New York, and who reemerged into a radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s.

Gripping and inventive, ambitious and mesmerising, A Brief History of Seven Killings is one of the most remarkable and extraordinary novels of the twenty-first century.