The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka is among the 12 books longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, which recognises the best in fiction every year.
Twelve other novels were included in the longlist, which was announced on Tuesday (26). The shortlist will be unveiled on 6 September, and the winner will be announced on 17 October.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is described as a rip-roaring epic and a searing, mordantly funny satire set amid the murderous mayhem of a Sri Lanka beset by civil war.
The plot is as follows: Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet queen, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time when scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long.
But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most, and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka.
If this seems familiar to you, that’s because you may know The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida as Chats with the Dead, the name under which it was published in our region. Shehan Karunatilaka himself is not an unfamiliar name, as he is considered one of Sri Lanka’s foremost authors, winning the Commonwealth Book Prize 2012, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2012, and the Gratiaen Prize 2008 for his debut novel, Chinaman.
In a post titled “13 things you need to know about the Booker Prize 2022 longlist” published on the The Booker Prizes website, it is stated that the longlisted authors hold a wealth of accolades, titles, and awards this year, but perhaps the most unusual belongs to Karunatilaka. “His debut novel, Chinaman, was named in 2019 by Wisden (yes, the cricketing bible) as the second greatest book about cricket to ever be written.”
Chats with the Dead or The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is his second novel.
The judges of the 2022 Booker prize had this to say about the novel: “Life after death in Sri Lanka: an afterlife noir, with nods to Dante and Buddha and yet unpretentious. Fizzes with energy, imagery and ideas against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars. Slyly, angrily comic.”
The Booker Prize is the leading literary award for English fiction, bringing recognition, reward and readership to outstanding novels for over five decades. It was first awarded in 1969. The prize is awarded to the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland, in the opinion of the judges.
The judges of the 2022 Booker Prize are British cultural historian broadcaster and writer Neil MacGregor, British broadcaster and academic Shahidha Bari, historian of the middle ages and 16th Century Helen Castor, genre-defying author and literary critic M. John Harrison, and novelist, journalist, poet, and academic Alain Mabanckou.
This is the second consecutive year a Sri Lankan author has been up for the Booker Prize, with A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam making it to the shortlist last year.
