The judges said what set the book apart “was the ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques.” As he races against time trying to solve his own murder mystery, what emerges is a satirical tale of a chaotic country, torn asunder by violence and held together along its frayed edges by the complicated commitment of men like Almeida. He has many problems of his own - he is a gambler, a closeted gay, and he has no clue about who his murderer is. War photographer Maali Almeida wakes up dead in what appears to be a bureaucratic office in the afterlife, even as his dismembered body is dumped in the Beira Lake in central Colombo.

Set in 1989, at the heart of a vicious and long-drawn civil war in Sri Lanka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a whodunnit set in the afterlife and came a decade after Karunatilaka’s feted debut. His latest collection of short stories, The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises (Hachette India) has just been published. He was also a guitarist with a band called Independent Square. He has been an advertising copywriter and has over 20 years’ work experience in Asian and European markets, including in Singapore, London, Colombo, Sydney and Amsterdam. The writer, who currently lives in Sri Lanka, has also written three children’s books. Karunatilaka’s cricketing parable, which cricketers’ almanac Wisden called the “second best cricket book of all time”, went on to win the Commonwealth Book Prize (2012) and the DSC Prize (2012). He burst on to the literary scene with Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, which he self-published in 2010, before it was picked up by Penguin Random House and launched in 2011. Born in Galle, Sri Lanka, in 1975, Karunatilaka is one of contemporary South Asia’s most exciting writers.

Chinaman by shehan karunatilaka