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Marlon James' new novel looks at 1970s Jamaica

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'A Brief History of Seven Killings'
'A Brief History of Seven Killings' by Marlon James
Book cover courtesy of publisher

Marlon James' new novel, "A Brief History of Seven Killings", is a sweeping look at Jamaican politics, history and pop culture in the 1970s.

Michiko Kakutani gave it a glowing review:

It's like a Tarantino remake of "The Harder They Come" but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner, with maybe a little creative boost from some primo ganja. It's epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex. It's also raw, dense, violent, scalding, darkly comic, exhilarating and exhausting -- a testament to Mr. James's vaulting ambition and prodigious talent.

James teaches at Macalester College. His last book, "The Book of Night Women," was about slavery in his native country of Jamaica and won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.