The Sri Lankan government is said to have done nothing. An estimated 3,000 people died and hundreds of Sri Lankan Tamils fled the pogroms. The aftermath inflamed anti-Tamil sentiment resulting in mass violence at the hands of Sinhalese mobs.

The novel’s action takes place in these early years, focusing on the riots of 1983, in which the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tigers) killed 13 Sri Lankan Army soldiers. It is predominantly a bitingly wry satire of the violence and corruption of the Sri Lankan civil war, which blazed from 1983-2009. Karunatilaka’s Booker-shortlisted novel is not easily categorisable. Not only that, but he has to find out who killed him. In seven moons he must, somehow, bring these images to Sri Lanka’s attention otherwise, he reflects, his life’s work will have been for nothing. Photos that could stop wars.” If only they weren’t in a white box under his bed. Photos that could, in his view, “bring down governments. While most ghosts only have memories of their lives, our licentious narrator had his faithful Nikon 3ST and a box full of hard proof of the horrors he has seen. Within the wider organising structure of the seven moons that the book is segmented into, there are vignettes scattered through each chapter that flicker between past and present.

The white-robed helpers are obtuse about what comes after, reminding him that rules are rules, and that he has seven moons (a week) to get his affairs in order before he enters “The Light” to be reborn. Slut.” And so begins our introduction to the Maali and his awakening in the afterlife, which is as bureaucratic and chaotic as the world he has suddenly departed from.Īs Maali begins to navigate the forms and regulations of the afterlife’s waiting room, he can’t remember how he died. He provides his eulogy, “If you had a business card, this is what it would say. It’s 1990 in Colombo, Sri Lanka where a brutal civil war continues to rage and our protagonist is dead.

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