A Fictional Account Of The Assassination Attempt On Bob Marley Wins Man Booker Prize 2015

'A Brief History of Seven Killings' by Marlon James has been named as the winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. 'A Brief History of Seven Killings' is published by Oneworld Publications. The 44-year-old, now resident in Minneapolis, is the first Jamaican author to win the prize in its 47-year history.

'A Brief History of Seven Killings' is a 686-page epic with over 75 characters and voices. Set in Kingston, where James was born, the book is a fictional history of the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1976. Of the book, the New York Times said: ‘It’s like a Tarantino remake of “The Harder They Come”, but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner...epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex.'

Referring to Bob Marley only as ‘The Singer’ throughout, 'A Brief History of Seven Killings' retells this near mythic assassination attempt through the myriad voices – from witnesses and FBI and CIA agents to killers, ghosts, beauty queens and Keith Richards’ drug dealer – to create a rich, polyphonic study of violence, politics and the musical legacy of Kingston of the 1970s.
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This is the first Man Booker Prize winner for independent publisher, Oneworld Publications.