The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Maali Almeida wakes in a vast celestial bureaucracy with no memory of how he died, and is informed that he has seven moons to sort out his affairs before he must go into the Light. It is 1990, Colombo, and the country is being fought over by the army, the Tigers, the JVP and various parties who profit from all three. Maali was a war photographer, a gambler and a closeted gay man, and he has left behind a box of negatives under a bed: photographs that show what each of these factions has actually done. He wants Jaki, his flatmate and cover story, and DD, the minister's son he loves, to find that box. He would also quite like to know who killed him, though the list of candidates is long and the afterlife is crowded with people who have the same complaint. Karunatilaka writes in the second person, with a cast of ghosts, demons and helpful bureaucrats, and turns the machinery of the Sri Lankan civil war into a farce that is never for a moment funny about the dead. It is furious, profane and formally audacious, and beneath the comedy sits a bleak question about whether evidence has ever stopped anybody.