The DisappearersThe Disappearers

"From Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings: a propulsive novel about the murder of a gay man in 1980s Jamaica and its unexpected consequences. In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a retelling of the classic play Pygmalion. The men are strangers to one another with different reasons for being involved. But they all share one inescapable truth: Each man is gay--a "batty man" in Jamaican argot--and each must contend with the perils that such a truth lays bare. One night when the men collect at a makeshift club in a deserted house, a mob swarms the place and savagely beats the men--one of them to death. While the others escape with their lives, they are all injured, both physically and emotionally. As the men recover, each begins to deal with the consequences of what happened: the violence, the hatred, the rage. Some try to ignore what they endured and witnessed, while others double down on retribution, seeking vengeance. As he did brilliantly in A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James conjures a compelling portrait of Jamaica and its complicated people. He has written both a dramatic page-turner and a frank exploration of queer life in Jamaica in the 1980s and 1990s, where gay people faced arrest, prison and even death. These "disappearers," who tried to live on their own terms, and the compromises they made to survive are at the core of this sweeping, unforgettable novel."--