Tribal War, CIA, Dons & Drugs: Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings

ONE EVENING, as I left the home of friend and fellow scribbler, Neil Spencer, he thrust a weighty tome into my hands and said, "You need read this but I want it back after." The book was A Brief History Of Seven Killings by Marlon James. I'd read James' first novel John Crow's Devil – a deranged and dark tale of spiritual combat in a remote Jamaican hamlet – and had recently toyed with reading his award winning second book, The Book Of Night Women – "a devastating epic of savage history, relentless oppression, and souls that refuse to be shackled". As I weighed A Brief History Of Seven Killings in my hand I knew I was about to be immersed no holds barred account of the most violent era in Jamaica's post slavery history.