Seven Moons of Maali, The

Maali Almeida wakes up dead, with no memory of how it happened and seven moons to settle his affairs before the afterlife moves him along. Shehan Karunatilaka sets the novel in Colombo during Sri Lanka's civil war, and the machinery of the dead turns out to be as bureaucratic and overcrowded as the city below it. Maali was a photographer whose negatives could damage several sides at once, so the plot turns on getting them into the right hands while the living argue over who he really was. The Penguin paperback runs to 400 pages and moves between ghost story, political thriller and black comedy without ever settling into one of them. Where it lands: • A dead narrator with a fixed deadline driving the plot • Colombo during the civil war, seen from both sides of death • Black comedy carried alongside serious political material • 400 pages in a Penguin paperback edition For readers of South Asian fiction, literary thrillers and afterlife narratives, published by Penguin and available at Boipoka.