Shehan Karunatilaka, winner of the Booker Prize 2022, began planning how to tell the brutal horrors of civil war in Sri Lanka through fiction more than a decade ago. He said he gradually realised he would need a magical realist presentation, because “only the dead could offer plausible explanations of the Sri Lankan tragedy, as the living clearly did not have a clue”.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, published by the independent Sort of Books, is the complex story of a gay war photographer who wakes up dead, in an underworld, and has “seven moons” (seven days) to discover who murdered him, expose his killer and find evidence to bring down a corrupt government.
