The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

RON CHARLES, THE WASHINGTON POST

"For months, I'd been hearing tantalizing, impossibly incongruous details about this novel, which is only now being published in the United States. It's all true: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a murder mystery and a zany comedy about military atrocities ... Weird and weirdly moving ... There's nothing merely aspirational or derivative about The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Karunatilaka's story drifts across Sri Lankan history and culture with a spirit entirely its own ... The novel's deeper themes reach beyond politics to the problem of evil that threads through every theology and moral code."

TOMIWA OWALADE, THE GUARDIAN (UK)

"Written in the second person, which gives the narrative a slightly distancing effect, but it's compensated for by the sardonic humour ... The obvious literary comparisons are with the magical realism of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. But the novel also recalls the mordant wit and surrealism of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls or Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. The scenarios are often absurd – dead bodies bicker with each other – but executed with a humour and pathos that ground the reader. Beneath the literary flourishes is a true and terrifying reality: the carnage of Sri Lanka's civil wars. Karunatilaka has done artistic justice to a terrible period in his country's history."