Marlon James' 'The Disappearers' Shortlisted for Booker Prize

Marlon James' new novel The Disappearers has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The book chronicles the events surrounding a vicious anti-gay attack in Jamaica in the late 1980s.

NPR's review calls the novel "fiercely personal" and says it "hits like a tidal wave." The critic writes that the book "churns with passion and ideas."

James, one of the most celebrated novelists writing today, sets his story in a Jamaica where homosexuality was criminalized and anti-gay violence was widespread. The late 1980s, the period the novel depicts, marked a particularly volatile moment in the island's history of homophobia — an era when attacks on gay men went largely unprosecuted and unreported.

The attack at the center of The Disappearers gives the novel its title. The victims, in James' telling, are people made to vanish — from their communities, from public record, from memory. The Booker shortlisting confirms what the review's language suggests: this is a work of unusual force.

"Fiercely personal" is a pointed description for a novel by an author who has repeatedly drawn on Jamaican material. James was born in Kingston and has set much of his fiction there, most prominently in his 2014 Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings. That novel, which orbit­ed the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley, made James the first Jamaican author to win the prize.

The Disappearers returns to similar terrain — violence, Jamaica, the buried histories of people the state and society preferred not to see — but turns the lens toward a community that has long lived under threat.

The reviewer's image of a tidal wave captures the book's accumulated power. James does not treat the anti-gay attack as an isolated incident but as the point around which lives, families and a whole society rearrange themselves.

The Booker Prize shortlisting places James once again among the leading novelists writing in English. Should he win, he would join a small group of authors — including J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel and J.G. Farrell — who have taken the prize more than once.

For readers, The Disappearers offers something rarer than a historical novel: an account of a violence that many preferred to forget, delivered with what NPR describes as passion, ideas and the force of a wave.

The Booker winner will be announced later this year.