A Brief History of Seven Killings

A Brief History of Seven Killings is the third novel by the Jamaican writer Marlon James, published by Riverhead Books in 2014. It is written as a fictional oral history, with a large cast of narrators carrying the story between them.

The book spans several decades. It begins with the attempted assassination of a reggae singer in Jamaica in 1976, follows the consequences into the crack wars of New York in the 1980s, and returns to Jamaica in the 1990s, by which time the country and the people involved in the shooting have both changed.

One of the narrators who introduces the book is the ghost of a murdered politician, and the body of the novel is divided into five sections, each named after a piece of music and each covering the events of one day. The shifting narrators mean that the same incident is described from several sides, and the novel never settles on a single account of what happened. It reached the paperback bestseller lists the following year.