Review
Life after death in Sri Lanka: an afterlife noir, with nods to Dante and Buddha and yet unpretentious. Fizzes with energy, imagery and ideas against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars. Slyly, angrily comic. — The 2022 Booker Prize
The South Asian epic we have been waiting for for a decade. Riotous, funny and heartbreaking. It stays with you long after you have finished reading it. — Mohammed Hanif
The wild horses of Shehan Karunatilaka’s imagination run fast, wild and true. — Jeet Thayil
Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka returns with a crackling whodunit a decade after his debut. — The Indian Express
Karunatilaka’s tone is almost in the vein of his literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut, combining the funny and the dreadful in a bleak, black way. — Open
Impressive . . . a tighter expression of his distinctive prose and an even more glaring mirror of Sri Lanka. — The Hindu
A big, brash beast of a novel, epic in scale and inventiveness. Shifting back and forth in tone from riotous to devastating, it is simultaneously a thrilling murder mystery, a razor-sharp indictment of Sri Lankan politics and society, and most intuitively, a morbidly funny yet perceptive rumination on mortality and what comes after death. –– Scroll
