Dead Man Talking

Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was awarded the Booker for a reason. It's unputdownable

- Aditya Mani Jha

Just over a decade ago, the Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka's novel Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew was drawing rave reviews from across the globe, scooping up a Commonwealth Prize and the DSC Prize for Literature along the way. It felt like an epochal shift. Not many South Asian writers received the kind of universal acclaim that Karunatilaka did, that too for a book that used cricket as the scaffolding for its narrative ambitions. Now, at 47, Karunatilaka has become the first-ever Sri Lankan novelist to win the prestigious Booker Prize, for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (originally published in India as Chats with the Dead). This rollercoaster of a novel begins with the demise, and subsequent re-awakening in the afterlife, of its 30-something queer protagonist (a "photographer and slut", as we are cheerfully informed).