A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS

On December 3, 1976, two cars pull up outside Bob Marley’s house in Kingston, Jamaica. Seven guys with guns – or is it eight?- jump out, rush into the house of the singer and try to murder him, shooting him 56 times – but they don’t succeed. The perpetrators remain unknown and unidentified.

With this event as his focus, Marlon James writes a story that is neither short nor does it only concern seven murders. The story involves secret service agents, gangsters, drug dealers, politicians, hitmen, a journalist, a strange nurse and the ghost of a murdered man who knows a lot…

And music, lots of music – how could it not, since we are in Jamaica, the homeland of reggae, rocksteady and ska?

The author writes about all this, and more that cannot be disclosed, in an exquisite way, delivering a masterpiece that won the Man Booker Prize in 2015.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is, according to the New York Times, like a remake of The Harder They Come, directed by Tarantino, but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a screenplay by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner…