MYSTICAL REALISM

Booker Prize-winning author Shehan Karunatilaka takes us on a journey to the afterlife

- BARRY RODGERS

Shehan Karunatilaka writes with a storyteller’s flair, a talent for telling an engaging tale matched by his latest novel’s ambition – the Booker Prize-winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Initially published in 2020 as Chats with the Dead, the story is set in Colombo and follows Maali Almeida, a recently deceased war photographer who navigates the afterlife while reckoning with the ghosts that haunt his country. For a place like Sri Lanka, the past is never really dead. The United Nations has estimated 80,000 to 100,000 deaths tied to the Sri Lankan civil war, a shockingly high number of those being civilians. The afterlife is sometimes a rather comic affair, drawing on Buddhist, Hindu, and other beliefs – with a splash of bureaucratic red tape that keeps the hereafter grounded in the here and now. Karunatilaka makes the wise choice to tell the story in the second person, Maali seemingly telling the tale to himself with a mix of sarcastic wit and streetwise sensibility. Despite the heaviness of the subject matter, Karunatilaka’s touch is light. After an exposition-heavy first chapter and a sloggy middle, this turns into a cracking page-turner, picking up steam as it goes, a whodunit wrapped in a morality play wrapped in an incredibly told story with compelling characters.