Jamaican Author Marlon James Releases New Novel
By Staff Writer, NewsAmericas Now
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. Sept. 3, 2026: Jamaican author Marlon James has released what he calls his most personal novel yet, “The Disappearers,” a 600-page epic drawing on his own closeted youth in Kingston – and it has already earned him a second Man Booker Prize nomination.
The 600-plus-page novel, out on Sept. 1st from Riverhead, centers on a brutal attack on a group of gay men rehearsing a play in 1980s Kingston, and follows the survivors as they begin to disappear in the years after. James told the New York Times the book was inspired by a rumor he heard in his youth about an attack on a queer safe space that was never officially confirmed, the kind of violence against marginalized people that often goes unspoken out of fear.
James, 55, grew up gay and closeted in Kingston through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, a period when Jamaica broadly rejected homosexuality. He told the Times he began writing partly to navigate school bullying, eventually studying literature at the University of the West Indies before working years in advertising and design. He published his first novel, “John Crow’s Devil,” in 2005, following it with “The Book of Night Women” in 2009 and his breakout, Booker Prize-winning “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” in 2015. James currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
According to the Times, James said the idea for “The Disappearers” came after he had already come out publicly and settled into life in the U.S., giving him the freedom to revisit the Jamaica he’d left behind out of fear. He described the novel as confronting “the story I was not allowed to live.”
To research the book, James interviewed nearly 20 people across Kingston about gay Jamaican life, past and present, telling the Times he expected to hear only horror stories but instead found comedy and defiance. He also conducted archival research at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York and traveled to London to research a chapter set in the city’s secret gay bars of the 1940s.
James finished the manuscript in December 2025 after working on it for months with his editor at Riverhead, according to the Times. The book was formally completed in July 2026 and was nominated for the 2026 Booker Prize shortly after, a moment James described to the paper as confirmation that the novel’s vulnerable characters “mean something to other people.”
Booker Prize judges called it “among Marlon James’s most ambitious and history-making works, a novel that examines territory Caribbean literature has rarely dared to occupy.”
“Beginning in late 1980s Kingston, it follows eight male actors rehearsing what is billed as Jamaica’s first openly gay play. When the men become victims of brutal homophobic violence, the novel shifts register: in the years that follow, one survivor sets out to investigate the fates of the others, and what begins as a theatrical story becomes something closer to a reckoning, he judges added. “James is a singular literary talent. His dialogue is sharp and propulsive, his phrasing is poetic, visceral and capable of moving from the painful to the darkly hilarious within a single exchange. The Disappearers could be read as a long overdue, clear-eyed confrontation with Jamaican homophobia: unflinching in its honesty, but written with the full complexity and love of someone who knows the place and its contradictions from the inside.”
The Times Dwight Garner writes: “It’s also an AIDS novel, a book about dying alone. (The disappearing acts of gay men are one of the title’s many meanings.) We follow one urbane Jamaican man named Havelock Titus back in time to Oxford University, where he studied and became a sexual chew toy for a set of patrician cads. He speaks of “malice” in old dining halls. He was at the doomed rehearsal and is ashamed that he ran away. He was an early AIDS patient. He recalls the days when a man could get hacked to death for wearing eye shadow.”
NewsAmericasNow will continue covering major literary milestones from the Caribbean diaspora.
