Nicholas Lezard

A ghoulish afterlife: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka, reviewed

The muttering ghosts of Sri Lanka’s civil war victims jostle each other for space in this dystopian novel that takes many moons to finish

Tamil Tiger commandos during Sri Lanka’s civil war, some only 12 years old. [Alamy] 
issue 10 September 2022

Ten years ago Shehan Karunatilaka’s first novel, Chinaman, was published and I raved about it, as did many others. Set in the 1980s, it intertwined the stories of a vanished, forgotten cricketer who was able to bowl unplayable deliveries and the particularly brutal war that was ravaging Sri Lanka. My review ended with the words: ‘Karunatilaka is, I gather, writing another novel, but how it can be as good as this I can hardly imagine.’

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