Originally published in August of 2022 by famed Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is set in 1989 in Colombo and tells the story of a war photographer named Maali Almeida. Almeida is also a degenerate gambler and a closeted gay man. One day, Almeida wakes up in a strange, celestial office. He is seemingly dead but has no idea who killed him - or who was mad enough at him to dismember his body. While Almeida tries to discover who killed him in a country famous for things like suicide bombers and death squads, he must also find the man and woman he loves the most and delivers photos to them that will rock the country that he loves.
Prior to the release of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Author Shehan Karunatilaka was perhaps best-known for the novel Chinaman, which was released in 2010. Like his previous novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida received incredibly positive reviews and is poised to be one of the most popular novels of 2022. In their review of the novel published on August 9, 2022, The Guardian wrote that "The scenarios [in the novel] are often absurd – dead bodies bicker with each other – but executed with humor and pathos that ground the reader. Beneath the literary flourishes is 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."
