A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, 688 pages.
The characters in this sprawling tale tell the stories separately (in the acknowledgements the author tells of how when he complained to a friend of how he had these individual stories but no overarching novel, she referred him back to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying) and often with no knowledge of the stories that the other characters tell. All of the stories are rooted in the 1976 shootings at Bob Marley's house (compound?, estate?) in Kingston. Marley, never named in the book, referred to simply as "the Singer," is talked about and obsessed about by the characters, but he himself only appears in memory, or onstage, off at a distance. He was shot and lived. His wife and his manager were shot and lived as well. All of them and all the characters in the book find their lives altered by the events.
The stories are told from the point of view of the people involved, thgang leaders like Papa Lo and Josey Wales, and the gunmen, dirt-poor, ignorant and high, Demus, Bam-Bam, and Heckle. Another main character is a woman who stumbles into the scene of the shooting because she believes that she the Singer have a strong connection, one that will save her.
We also hear from the ghost of a Jamaican politician,  a couple of CIA operatives, and a writer for Rolling Stone.

A great, great book.
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