The Disappearers

James brings multilayered life to a troubling era in his homeland’s recent history. He engages with his landscapes and the diverse characters populating them with intensity, passion, and bountiful, often graphic detail. With the same affinity for Dickensian storytelling he’s shown in his sword-and sorcery epics, James tells this searingly realistic tale through interview fragments, journal entries, letters, and in recreating the horrific attack, with random, frantic voices that leave unsettling echoes. Even when it stress-tests your senses, this sprawling depiction of gay life in Jamaica is galvanizing

Kirkus Reviews *starred review*

Crackling with sass, suspense and scintillation, The Disappearers is Marlon James’s unapologetic and unvanquished masterpiece on queer rage and solidarity

Santanu Bhattacharya

This language-rich novel is filled with vivid slang … As always, James writes exceptionally well….This book may remind readers of works by John Rechy, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and Hubert Selby, but James is his own man

Library Journal, *starred review*

Captivating and epic . . . James renders his characters’ tumultuous inner lives with striking imagery and energy; their dialogue is rapid, keen, and hard-hitting. In all, a gritty, powerful, and gripping read

Booklist

The Disappearers is among Marlon James’s most ambitious and history-making works, a novel that examines territory Caribbean literature has rarely dared to occupy . . . James is a singular literary talent. His dialogue is sharp and propulsive, his phrasing is poetic, visceral and capable of moving from the painful to the darkly hilarious within a single exchange

Booker Prize Judges

A scorching exposé of homophobia in Jamaica . . . Mighty, grand and peripatetic . . . Few books have mapped the beleaguered realities of queer existence with such psychological depth, harrowing realism and searing condemnation . . . James makes room for the contradictions of queer life, its intimacies, estrangements and hungers, in utterly indelible ways. His prose is a consistent triumph: bitter and hilarious, lyrical, bawdy, pugnacious and scorchingly, ravishingly queer. The Booker judges have described this novel as a "reckoning"; it is incontestably also a haunting . . . A remarkable novel

Guardian

James has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far . . . It deserves to be talked about alongside Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, for its tumult of language and its crisscrossing post-colonial themes; Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (James picks up on a revenge scenario from that novel); and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! . . . The Disappearers was one of the signal reading experiences of my adult life. It sank knives deep into my heart. I’m still in recovery from it . . . You don’t finish The Disappearers. It finishes you

New York Times

A violence-driven protest, a scream of rage . . . harrowing book, to be sure, but never nihilist, or defeatist, or cynical. Its joy in ultimate survival comes through

Atlantic

An ambitious and astonishing portrait of queer life . . . The author has outdone himself

Publishers Weekly, *starred review*

A more intimate and less mythologized prose than in his previous work with a gravity that is felt on every page

Shelf Awareness

It’s a harrowing, hilarious, magnificent novel that will stand the test of time

Boston Globe

This unrelentingly raw and profane vision is enlivened by the energy of the writing, and in particular its infusions of Jamaican slang. James does not simply reproduce the island’s singular patois; he uses it to create abrasive auditory rhythms

Wall Street Journal

The Disappearers packs a punch on every single one of its 600-plus pages, up to and including its last . . . It’s an epic, virtuosic, propulsive performance, alternately hilarious and viscerally horrifying, that returns throughout to the acts of erasure perpetrated against, and forced upon, the men at its heart

Daily Mail

James’s dialogue fountains down the page, as if a tap has been opened. Life pours from him . . . James roves among the attackers’ perspectives before and during the event, his experimental style, psychological acuity, and ragged lyricism on display . . . The Disappearers uses the tricks of fiction to pull off something extremely difficult: giving full weight to tragedy and injustice without implying that some lives are over before they’ve begun

New Yorker

One hell of a book, and at times, a shocking one . . . hard to put down . . . A good book can lift your spirits, brighten your day or add some spice to a dull life, but the truly great books change how you think, what you see and, hopefully, how you live. The Disappearers is one of those

BookPage, *starred review*

A compelling examination of homophobia, erasure and survival . . . James is a mercurial writer of complexity, depth and uncompromising vision. The Disappearers — his first Jamaican-set novel since his 2015 Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings — crackles with his anger and intelligence, but also, crucially, refuses to play anything safe . . . And with rigour, beauty and righteous anger, Marlon James exposes them in this exceptional and important novel

Financial Times

Wickedly funny, at times sexy, and full of longing

Harper’s Bazaar