Marlon James reads from "A Brief History of Seven Killings"

From the acclaimed author of The Book of Night Women comes one of the year's most anticipated novels, a lyrical, masterfully written epic that explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the late 1970s.

On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert, gunmen stormed his house, machine guns blazing. The attack nearly killed the Reggae superstar, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Marley would go on to perform at the free concert on December 5, but he left the country the next day, not to return for two years.

Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters--assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts--A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the '70s, to the crack wars in '80s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the '90s. Brilliantly inventive and stunningly ambitious, this novel is a revealing modern epic that will secure Marlon James' place among the great literary talents of his generation.

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Marlon James, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, NBCC Fiction Prize and the NAACP Image Award, is among the most critically acclaimed, provocative, and powerful writers of his generation. Unflinching in his examinations of race, violence, and sexism in the US and Jamaica, James illuminates dark and uncomfortable truths with wisdom, grace, and humanity. The New York Times Book Review praised his novel The Book of Night Woman as “Beautifully written and devastating writing in the spirit of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker but in a style all his own, James has conducted an experiment in how to write the unspeakable—even the unthinkable.”