The Disappearers

by Marlon James

From Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings: a propulsive novel about the murder of a gay man in 1980s Jamaica and its tragic consequences.

In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica begin rehearsals for a play. Though strangers to one another, they share an inescapable truth: All of them are gay. And they live in a world that refuses to accept them.

One night the men are savagely beaten and one of them is killed. As their bodies heal, the survivors begin to face the hatred and contempt that the violence laid bare. Some try to ignore what happened. Others double down on retribution. Some disappear completely.

In The Disappearers, Marlon James has written a riveting and deeply human story of men forced to make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands. It is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Literary Fiction, Historical, Novels

640 pages, Hardcover

First published September 3, 2026

About the author

Marlon James is a Jamaican-born writer. He has published three novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009) and A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Now living in Minneapolis, James teaches literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

James was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to parents who were both in the Jamaican police: his mother (who gave him his first prose book, a collection of stories by O. Henry) became a detective and his father (from whom James took a love of Shakespeare and Coleridge) a lawyer. James is a 1991 graduate of the University of the West Indies, where he read Language and Literature. He received a master's degree in creative writing from Wilkes University (2006).

James has taught English and creative writing at Macalester College since 2007. His first novel, John Crow's Devil — which was rejected 70 times before being accepted for publication — tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957. His second novel, The Book of Night Women, is about a slave woman's revolt in a Jamaican plantation in the early 19th century. His most recent novel, 2014's A Brief History of Seven Killings, explores several decades of Jamaican history and political instability through the perspectives of many narrators. It won the fiction category of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, having been the first book by a Jamaican author ever to be shortlisted. He is the second Caribbean winner of the prize, following Trinidad-born V. S. Naipaul who won in 1971.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Maxwell]

This is one of those books that's so good I forgot at times I was reading a book. It's truly stunning how Marlon James thinks and writes and depicts these characters: their struggles, their glories, their conversations, their pain, their thoughts, their motivations. This is also one of the most difficult and upsetting books I've ever read. But the trauma, pain, and vi0lence is not without purpose. It's graphic in all manner of ways and contains this bodily-ness that very few writers today will even approach. James has crafted a narrative filled with characters that come to life, hold up a mirror to society, and then smash it. It's visceral, deeply moving, and singular.

[Ron Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

You’ll have to read Marlon James’s new novel, The Disappearers, wearing asbestos gloves. The pages of this incomparable epic are fueled by desire and torched by rage.

The author, who won a Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings and then began a trilogy of mind-blowing African fantasies, has returned to Jamaica, his homeland, for what he’s calling his most personal novel.

The Disappearers is a story about living and dying, particularly dying, in the toxic homophobia of the late 20th century, when James was growing up in Kingston begging God to cleanse him. He doesn’t appear in the novel — “I am still lucky,” he quips, “never to have been one of the characters in a Marlon James novel” — but its spirit is informed by his own closeted life before he left the Caribbean. “Whether it was in a plane or a coffin,” he wrote in 2015, “I knew I had to get out of Jamaica.”

Out — and out of Jamaica — for years now, James has produced a book no less ambitious than Beloved, a novel to reckon with the ectoplasm of suffering and restore the presence of vanished people. Just as Toni Morrison’s classic shifted our understanding of the experience and legacy of slavery, so The Disappearers aspires to explode complacency and sear in the minds of readers the horrors of living in a world hostile to homosexuality.

This is an omnivorous novel, a book straining against its covers to contain the whole racial, economic, and political construction of sexual prohibitions imported from Britain and fermented in the Jamaican heat. But the length of The Disappearers — some 616 pages — is only its most obvious challenge. Far greater are....

Read the rest of this review for free on Substack:
https://roncharles.substack.com/p/mar...

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize

This book is relentless, and not always in a good way. It shows its ambitions in the language, length, structure, topics, basically everything. It asks to be read as serious literature, and that made it feel like work despite telling a very personal and important story for a gay reader like myself.

I think the best part remains the beginning. We know from the blurb that something bad is going to happen, but I think it is able to show that a community forced to stay hidden still exists in homophobic places like Jamaica.

We can see how AIDS was used as a tool to dehumanize the people it was killing, the fears of the characters (the act of buying a Prince album is something that must remain hidden for one of them), their difficulties (another is homeless), their own self-hate (one doesn't want to play the woman in the play), but also their hope for first love, for a future when they wouldn't have to hide.

Making a play is a bid for visibility for them. While it is true that they never get to perform it, they saw each other in the rehearsals. It is enough. It could have been the start of a great friendship, and it is, but it is brutally derailed by an attack on them.

As a gay reader, this part was disturbing. It is the most graphic thing I've read. It is relentless. It goes on page after page. It's the total opposite of what happens in Brokeback Mountain (which in itself is hard to revisit because it's one of the saddest things ever), where you get the emotional impact with so little. This book wants to put you there and make you take it. It wants the violence to be unignorable, to break you, to make you numb to it, and that's exactly the point it is trying to make. The violence against these gay men (and gay men in general in countries similar to Jamaica) isn't just emotional. It doesn't stop when a gay man is broken. It stops only when the attacker decides.

What comes next is also true. We see from different perspectives what this hate crime did to the survivors. It broke them in one way or another. One is forced to continue his life as a blind man, another is trying to be the support for the others, one chooses to leave and bury it deep down, one chooses to stay and get his revenge, one disappears. If it sounds poetic, that's a false impression. The book continues to show the ugly side of being a survivor. It remains as violent and graphic as before, and it is 100% the truth, but that doesn't make the reading experience less difficult.

Which brings me to my difficulty in rating the novel. I understand everything it is doing. I want to applaud its ambitions. I don't want to be that guy who asks for difficult reads and when one comes, complains that it shouldn't have been as difficult, that at least one aspect should have been more chill. But I am. And this is my rating... for the moment.

Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss+ for the advance copy.

[Richard Derus · Rating 5 out of 5]

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE Shortlist will be announced on September 22.

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings: a propulsive novel about the murder of a gay man in 1980s Jamaica and its tragic consequences.

In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica begin rehearsals for a play. Though strangers to one another, they share an inescapable truth: All of them are gay. And they live in a world that refuses to accept them.

One night the men are savagely beaten and one of them is killed. As their bodies heal, the survivors begin to face the hatred and contempt that the violence laid bare. Some try to ignore what happened. Others double down on retribution. Some disappear completely.

In The Disappearers, Marlon James has written a riveting and deeply human story of men forced to make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands. It is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Y'all do not know what it means to be at risk of your life for what you do in your bedroom. It's okay with church ladies, sports stars, politicians, dumb fucks on street corners, to insult, threaten, jeer at, and...if there are enough of them...chase and beat you, often enough to death, because of what you do in your bedroom.

It's the reality of being yourself as a queer person. It's not different in the US, only for the most part quieter.

So these 640 pages will come as a illusion-threatening denial-generating surprise to the majority of you. It will cause knee-jerk "no, it's not *that* bad." Yes. It is.

Yes. It is.

This story is based on real events. It should shame every one of you who's made a homophobic joke, laughed at stories with lisping queens, or any of the other minstrel-show-with-fags stuff you've seen and heard, because it Others and thus aids in desensitizing murderous idiots. Maybe you didn't mean it to, but it did and it does. I don't think any of you will read this book, so let me tell you what happens:

A bunch of gay guys get together to put on a play that no one is forcing anyone to watch. A gang of those guys who make the jokes you laugh at decide they don't like the fact they're doing this, so they go to the place the rehearsals...not even a public performance...take place, and beat the actors for daring to address the feelings and concerns of people like them before, I remind you, the play that no one is forced to watch unless they choose to so severely one loses his sight.

And one dies.

The remaining six are traumatized.

Because y'all hate people. Who do not ask you to participate in sex, celebrate Otherness, or even make yourselves aware of individual acts of entertainment's existence. "*I* didn't do that" no, but did you ever stop a joke to deride a bigot to interrupt a hate-filled sermon?

No. You did not.

So these eight men lost lives they weren't through living, altered or ended, because no one ever stood up and said "what you do to these men you do also to me" and stood in solidarity at a grocery store, in a meeting, at a dinner party, and said "stop."

Sleep tight.

[Traci Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a damn good book. So well written. So smart. Intense. Manipulative (complimentary). Violent, funny, sexy, fucked up beyond belief while always driving toward the story. The way pop culture influences the book is profound and so well done. Easily a book of 2026.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Booker Longlist #13

3.5, rounded up.

Ostensibly, this should have been right in my wheelhouse, since it begins with the story of a gay theatre troupe - and I taught a gay theatre course at USF. But I had much the same issues with this as I did with James' first Booker winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings: difficulties in following exactly what is happening; keeping the multitude of characters (pardon the expression!) straight; the relentless violence and sexual explicitness; constantly running to the PC to look up the Jamaican patois.

It is also one of those books that, IMHO, would be twice as effective at half the length - not everything included is strictly necessary, and I felt we lost the thread of the story several times while meandering on and on with superfluities and repetitions (looking at you, Pt. 4!).

That said, there are many powerful set pieces, and even if I felt bludgeoned and violated myself at a few points, both the violence and the explicit sex are integral to the work as a whole. The end sequence, though effective, did leave me a trifle flummoxed, in that after all that had gone before, I found it difficult to reconcile that Eddy would not have immediately recognized Matt/Rupert -even after 20 years.

As I rate and rank books on the basis of personal enjoyment as well as inherent worthiness, this is only going in 4th place in my personal Booker list, since I can't say there was much joy to be found here - although I fully understand those who rank it #1 (... something I can't fathom for those who place, say Helen of Nowhere first). Extolling it as the book of the decade, let alone century, I do find more than a bit hyperbolic, however.

PS- am curious if James had to get permission from John Herbert's estate for use of his play Fortune and Men's Eyes, even though he altered the text, since it's still under copyright. I didn't see any permission mentioned, but I read an ARC.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes I try to picture that year had the play been a success. It leaves me confused. I don't know what success would have meant anyway. What nobody tells you about tragedy is that it Lowers your expectations of people and yourself. Lose your toes and success means still having a f-ing foot. So, success became a rehearsal that did not leave a body count, a reading that did not leave one with his eyes gouged out. I don't know if failure is something that never succeeded or was never tried. Maybe a woman mourns an abortion the same way one does a stillbirth. Somebody out there is saying that communism never failed because it was never tried. I only say that because that is how I feel about this play. Fortune and Men's Eyes. It never had the chance to become a failure so instead it became a ghost. You wouldn't know this but in the Caribbean the stillbirth becomes a peculiar spirit, menacing because it is so innocent. It never grows old enough to know that it shouldn't wail in the early morning like some hacksaw jagging and cutting through the darkness. Like somebody had cut its throat. The only thing a ghost can do is haunt you.

Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize

Jamaican novelist Marlon James “A Brief History of Seven Killings” was the winner of the 2015 Booker Prize (as an aside another novel on that year’s shortlist “A Little Life” has clearly had a greater longevity and cult-like divisive status even to the present day). A fictionalised account of Bob Marley (known as “The Singer” throughout) it was distinctive both for its patios and for its violence-infused text dealing with gang, drug, political and CIA-sanctioned violence. I have to say I was a rare dissenter on the novel – my least favourite Booker winner of all time – I found the stream of consciousness slang hard to follow and the sordid and violent world it portrays making it unpleasant reading when I could follow ………… and I think ultimately my issue was that while acknowledging that gangs exist, basing a novel around them felt gratuitous.

Now after a diversion for many years into Afro-Centric Fantasy with his trilogy of “Black Leopard”, “Red Wolf” and “Moon Witch, Spider King”, James returns both to literary fiction, Jamaica and to a world of violence – but here the violence seems to be very necessary and integral to the tale he is telling of a deliberate erasure in Jamaican culture and history of both its gay population and of the terrible and wantonly violent, at times literally murderous persecution of that group.

It is however an equally difficult read – not least as that violence is set aside some lengthy explicitly sexual passages, which mainly describe in almost porn-like detail, transactional often transitory encounters and include various scenes which are at least adjacent to prostitution, forces sexual assaults and even semi-consensual gang-bangs.

The novel has a series of five distinctive sections taking place from 1988 to 2005 although with an epistolary history back to the late 1940s.

It begins with a cast of six wanabee actors, a stage manager and a producer/director Havelock Titus taking part in the latter’s attempt to stage a controversial real-life play (“Fortune and Men’s Eyes”) set in a youth reformatory and exploring homosexuality and sexual power plays in that prison environment – one of the actors Eddy Porteous is the first party narrator. Eddy is attracted to another actor – Matt Chin and also intrigued and a little concerned by the fact that another Jordon Brown seems to be living in his car and visiting the notorious mansion of Paul Royale.

I enjoyed a lot of this first section although I found it hard to really follow the play sections as they were too fragmentary and this did not help with simultaneously trying to get to know the eight protagonists of the novel and the six of the play. I suspect a full appreciation would require a read of the play.

The section ends (no spoilers as its integral to the novel’s blurb) with a violent attack on the play (for which Eddy is not present) – and in a memorably harrowing second section we alternate between various members of the murderous and frenzied mob who descend on the play’s protagonists with terrible consequences (but also with impunity given the societal backlash against homosexuality which has only been magnified by AIDS hysteria). The protagonists include (and are inspired by) a reggae singer Streggeh Don known for his aggressively homophobic lyrics including “Batty is not Pussy”.

The third and longest (and I have to say for me least enjoyable) section tells us of those consequences – one actor killed and sexually assaulted with a tree branch, one with his eyes gouged out, and two subsequently missing (including Matt). The third section is largely told by one of the remaining actors – Jordon – as he and Eddy (Eddy guilty that for family reasons he was not present, Jordon in effect guilty for being relatively unscathed – at least in terms of long term physical impact) both try to come to terms with the mental aftermath of the attack and try to trace the two missing men (Matt in particular proving complex – with even pre attack an apparent series of identities). Both of these quests are linked by the idea that “there’s a difference between when something ends and when something stops” and by linked ideas and different layers of disappearance. And the ostensible set up of this section is that large parts of it are from tapes made by a documentary journalist interviewing both Jordan and (to a lesser extent) Eddy for a project whose working title is the same as the novel. Jordon processes much of life through song lyrics (particularly of the indie/grunge variety) “I wonder if I really don't have a voice of my own with only rock lyrics to talk for me. When I don't have words and my own head feels like it's going to explode, I play the end of Nirvana's "Territorial Pissings" and scream into a pillow. One time when it hit me that I was in my own damn house, I screamed out in the open Gotta find a way, a better way, I'd better wait over and over until I spit something out in the dark that tasted slippery like blood.” – but much of what he processes are the aforementioned sexual encounters including one with someone he believes to be one of the attackers and who he effectively grooms before taking a plotted revenge.

The fourth section is very much a change of pace and style if not theme – a series of rather stylistically restrained and old-fashioned letters from Havelock to a man who pimped him into establishment circles in London post war. As part of this Havelock gives us some clearer explanation of some parts of the previous sections and also reveals his concern that Jordon is carrying out a series of revenge attacks on those who believed participated in the attack as well as in some cases (we learn here and subsequently) sometimes targeted (but sometimes simply tit for tat attacks on heterosexuals) in response to homophobic atrocities.

The fifth and final section is split into two parts – one dark the other redemptive. In the first a by now rather deranged mid 30s Jordon effects his final revenge in a kidnap of Streggeh Don – a scene rendered even more terrible when Haverlock traces him. But the last gives us the story of one of the missing men and his encounter with an Eddy no longer forced to make his sexuality disappear.

Overall it was a novel which feels as necessary as his Booker winner felt to me gratuitous. But at the same time I found it much more striking to reflect on than to actually enjoying reading, and I would therefore hesitate to unreservedly recommend it.

My thank to Viking, Penguin General UK for an ARC via NetGalley and paper ARC.

Of all the f-dup things happening in the world to us, you think that is the thing to not make me sleep at night. No, it wasn't a question. I'm trying to find two gay men who just gone poof when battymen vanishing all around us. That is what AIDS is after all, isn't it? One long set of disappearing acts. First is watching the friends and family disappeal. Second act is when people try to disappear you. Third act is watching your body vanish from itself and wondering where the f- you going, piece by piece, until all of you gone. I swear to God, at one point I used to think people with AIDS just evaporate. If there is a fourth act it's when everybody erase your name as if you were never born in the first place

[Stephen the Bookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Booker Longlist 2026

“Learn to run fast on short notice. I wanted Eddy to see this, after all he just experienced as an exception what some of us experience as a rule. Really"

"At some point I stopped being clever and ended up being unconscious because at about five in the morning I woke up in a hospital ward.."

Once in a while, you read a novel that is so powerful and even graphic that you have to pause now and again to get your thoughts together, take a breath and continue knowing that things will still be a challenging read - but more to the point that what you are reading is important and essential to enter and understand a world of violence and cruelty that is inflicted upon a community.

The Disappearers begins in 1988 in Kingston Jamaica when a group of gay men meet to be cast in an openly gay play; this is dangerous in a society where to be gay - or not heteronormative - is illegal and the law is taken into the hands of anyone who feels the need to use violence as a form of justice. This is the era where the word AIDS was used to legitimise violence as a weapon. It is not long before the men are cruelly and viscously attacked by a group of men ( including police) one is murdered and the others sustain violent injuries. This is not easy reading at all but is so vital.

Each of themes tries other continue their lives in their own way- some want to forget; some want to runaway ; some want retribution. Their struggles are palpable and heartbreaking but even within this group of men there is need to try and understand and accept the choices made by one another.

The world of the men is explored and the hidden world of Jamaican gay community- the prose is explicit, and direct but none of it is written for the sake of deliberate provocation - every element builds a picture of the lives- the tragedies, the battles and sometimes the joys.

Marlon James has written a masterpiece ( yes, Book Longlisted 2026- if it wins it will be a miracle but certainly deserves plaudits and attention)

There is dark humour within the story and the referencing of music during the 80s and 90s adds a strong period dynamic as well as another level of connection with some of the characters as the lyrics enter their thoughts and words as a comfort and power.

Marlon James' words are unwavering /fearless in their desire to make every reader truly understand the vileness of a society that cannot accept difference ( and hides away the hypocrisy of some "straight men")

This will unsettle some readers but in a world where the rise of the rightwing and laws are being being repealed against diversity, then The Disappearers is a powerful reminder how far some parts of the world may have moved forward ( but could easily regress) but also to make us realise that in some places gay sex is still illegal - Jamaica to this very day - and violence is still part of some people's agenda.

This is a story that cries out to let us all be who we want to be and illuminates a world where acceptance is never fully given

Superb.

Thank you Marlon James

Thank you to Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House and NetGalley for an advance for an honest and unbiased review

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize

"She will come back as fire! Burn all the liars, leave a blanket of ash on the ground”
Frances Farmer Shall Have Her Revenge on Seattle, by Nirvana

I’m back at the end of James Joyce’s “An Encounter” where the narrator discovers that he always despised his friend a little. We about to do this dance? I ask myself. Where gay people try to be gay in the presence of thine enemies. Except there is no Jamaican Polari, no secret Jamaican gay language. I’m sure there is some battyboy code, but I never hang around any society long enough to learn it, except for the sex stuff because that language is business jargon.

John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw, page twenty-eight: The promiscuous homosexual is a sexual revolutionary. There is no point to straight sex other than to breed, since the chances of the man and the woman experiencing the same degree of pleasure is next to nil. There is no point to gay sex other than pleasure, since no pussy has ever impregnated a pussy and no asshole can breed.

Marlon James' The Disappearers is a novel in five parts, a searing and explicit confrontation with the violent homophobia of Jamaica in the period in which it is set.

1. THE PLAY, May 1988
2. THE BLACKJACKS, June 1988
3. THE DISAPPEARERS, April–December 1994
4. THE EXILE AND RETURN, February–December 1999
5. THE NEW WORLD, August 2005

THE PLAY is in the form of a journal written by Eddy Porteous, in his late teens. He is one of 5 men who answer a call, coded to reach the gay community, to act in a play.

The director, financer, state manager and volunteer cast:

Havelock Titus, director, producer, former bon vivant
Omar Joseph, his own boss, millionaire, actor
Clive Lim, stage manager
Jordan Brown, expelled student, actor, boy of slender means
Matt Chin, business executive, actor
Rainford Ellis, office worker, actor
Edmond “Eddy” Porteous, student, actor, second son
Orrin Turner, data systems manager, actor

The play is Havelock's adaption of Fortune and Men's Eyes, by John Herbert (the original's title itself taken from a Shakespeare sonnet).

Eddy's journal leads us through the rehearsals for the play, his own troubled home life, and his kinship but also rivalry with fellow cast member Jordan, the two sharing a love of literature but in Eddy's case a need for apporoval and in Jordan's a competing need to be seen as the smartest in the room.

On one hand I really don’t want to be in a car with Jordan, but on the other hand I really want to be in his car. I want to see how a man who lives in his car lives. It must be freeing or something, a space that can set up knowing that no mother will ever walk in to talk about clothes on the floor and porn in the drawers she’s supposed to stop checking. But honestly there is a part of me that also wants to see what life will be like when my parents finally kick me out of the house and disown their son. I feel it coming. Don’t know if it coming soon, but I feel it coming. Telling myself all sort of shit don’t help, stuff like they’re an uptown family, they won’t throw me out on the street, they’ll ship me off to Miami or New York or somewhere in America, which would only make me happier. I think. They can’t have it come out that they have a son on the street, or that he is a battyboy.

The journal ends with Eddy missing a day of rehearsal, due to family issues, and thereby escaping a violent attack on the company from a homophobic mob, which leaves one man dead and another blinded.

THE BLACKJACKS tells the story of that event from the perspective of the attackers, who are led by rapper Streggeh Don, singer of the homophobe's anthem "Batty is not Pussy." The section is told in a series of vox pops.

Corporal T.
First thing we do, we take our unforms off. Put on clothes that make blackness blacker. Ten phone calls to ten men with ten clubs. Call them the blackjack.

Aaron L.
And we walk in on them all wearing stoosh clothes like they sailing in from one hundred years ago. At first it looks like it’s the costumes that turned around frightened. One looks like Sherlock Holmes. Another looks like he walked out of Oliver Twist—not the TV show on Sunday night but the movie where every minute somebody burst out a song. Good movie but as usual no black people star in it, so I know these battyboys are doing the white man thing. White is the root of all sexual sin, since according to Black Israel it’s sexual sin that birthed the white race in the first place.
And one faggot, the older one in the green jacket, says something that sounds like what a Jeeves the butler would say, but we don’t hear it. And another, the one who looks white but is really yellow, says another thing that also sounds stoosh, and a skinny one (three of them are skinny) drops his wrist and says no no no no no, and another skinny one who looks like Kunta Kinte runs so fast that he runs into another TV show, and yet another one whose skin is shoe polish and whose hair is like young Bob Marley, he look at us and scream. No, not a scream but something a dog says before he bites you. Then he grabs a broomstick.

THE DISAPPEARERS begins in April 1994, on the day of Kurt Cobain's death, and is narrated by Jordan. In the section's present he has a sexual relationship with one of the Blackjacks (who doesn't recognise Jordan), a man who took part in the attack 6 years earlier in an unsucessful attempt to expunge his own homosexual feelings.

Jordan quotes music lyrics to express feelings he cannot articulate is his own words, in particular grunge, referencing various songs from, inter alia, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Hole and the Pixies.

I didn’t want to go, but I couldn’t stay there. So I went down to Kingston Harbor and walked the docks all night. There were two things that were supposed to happen. Some boy so poor that he couldn’t afford a sense of right and wrong would see fresh meat with a wallet attached and beat me to a pulp until it dropped out. Or another kind would see fresh meat with a wallet attached and draw down ’pon me to see how much of that wallet he could lick, suck, or fuck out. Like the R&B song said, I was truly down for whatever. I think what happened was the third thing, would-be robbers, fuckers, and killers saw a mad man screaming “She will come back as fire! Burn all the liars, leave a blanket of ash on the ground” and stayed the fuck away.

I couldn’t believe he left us. I couldn’t believe he left me.
My parents kicked me out to live on the street in 1986 when I was seventeen years old, yet April 8, 1994, was the first time I ever felt alone. That’s not true. I’ve felt alone since I was eight years old and realized that Robert Jackson didn’t like me the way I liked him, but this was the first time it felt like this was something someone did to me.

Jordan also looks back on his and Eddy's attempt to find two of their fellow cast members who vanished after the attack, this part primarily told from interviews given by Jordan in 1993 to a journalist, who also spoke with Eddy in 1992.

THE EXILE AND RETURN is a series of letters written in 1999, from the play's director, Havelock, to an old friend Mark, from his time at Oxford and subsequent post-grad time in London. The 61yo Havelock, back in Jamaica after receiving a cocktail of drugs to combat the AIDS he has lived with for over a decade, looks back on his life including, reluctantly, the events of June 1988,

This goddamn business of getting old though. I, Havelock Titus, submit that those who lose their minds early are luckier because they are no longer aware of a mind to lose. They certainly don’t have to be aware of the constant indignities that come with losing one’s body. Add to that, my friend, what was fact only five years ago: that neither of us were never supposed to die of old age. I’m not even talking about AIDS. I mean that as queers, stately old homos, faggots, (or for some Jamaican flavor) battymen, our life expectancies should have run out at least ten years ago.

I for one thought I would go down blazing, and by “blazing,” darling, I do mean in the most literal sense: with a car tire lassoed around my neck and my bound arms and beaten body set afire by a righteous Jamaican mob. We always thought God had already chose the person who would come to kill us. If not with the mob, then the police. If not the cops, then some boy who will love us, murder us, then tell the police that we grabbed his balls, God is his witness.

The letters are erudite (the first opens with a reference to The Life of Hadrian), although wonderfully one is wriiten in Polari. And we also catch up with the present situation of Jordan and Eddy, each still impacted by events 11years earlier, but in very different ways.

THE NEW WORLD is in two parts, the first a monologuefrim a crazed Jordan, now 36, to Streggeh Doh:

June the 3rd, 1988. That’s when you and your closest friends, you and your anti-faggot gestapo, drop down on we like it was Kristallnacht. Don’t bother, you don’t fucking know what that is. You know which one of us was Omar? From the point you all invite yourselves in, there was no way you was going to leave that house with any trace of the gay. Yow, ever hear about this man named Eminem? White rapper. Famous. Biggest in the world. You would like him. But this bredda, his favorite thing to rap about is how he hate homosexuals. Hate them like how Jesus hate sin. Yet, and this is where you come in, Streggeh, there is more cocksucking and butt fucking goin’ on in his records than any gay porn. My point being that for a bunch of men who can’t stand it, you seem really obsessed with how we fuck. I mean, “Batty Is Not Pussy” is basically a manual on gay sex. You even include foreplay.

And the last part reintroduces us to one of those who went missing.

The novel contains copious explicit depictions of sex and violence, sometimes combined, although given the subject matter this feels integral rather than gratuitous, and it falls short, in both extremeness but also literary impact, of the (in)famous The Part about the Crimes of 2666.

An ambitious work and a powerful if far from pleasant read, and one the judges would have struggled to overlook.

A grunge playlist from the novel

Nirvana - Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle; Radio Friendly Unit Shifter; Territorial Pissings; Come As You Are; Rape Me; and Been a Son as representative of Incesticide, whose sleeve note is referenced
Soundgarden - Superunknown
Hole - Asking For It; Gutless
Young Marble Giants, also Hole - Credit in the Straight World
Pixies - Broken Face
Sonic Youth - Kool Thing and Tunic (Song for Karen) - both as representative songs from Goo, the album cover referenced (James has previously referenced Kool Thing)

The judges' commendation

‘The Disappearers is 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.

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.’

[Eric Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

First Impressions

I've now read Marlon James's new 600-plus-page novel, "The Disappearers", and I'm still reeling from everything it stirred up in me. This is not a light or entertaining read, and it was never meant to be; James himself has acknowledged that his books aren't easy. But it took me on a journey that left me both challenged and changed. The novel has only just been published and has already been canonised by critics, with Dwight Garner in the New York Times calling it a “masterpiece and, quite possibly, the novel of the decade or even the century.” That claim has already sparked a lot of pushback and debate. Ron Charles at the Washington Post stated he was “glad to have read it but equally glad to be done with it. To the extent that it’s a great novel, it’s also an ordeal.” Personally, I wouldn't call it an ordeal. The opening section, structured as a 1988 diary kept by one of the central characters, Eddy, actually charmed me: there's real humanity and humour in these entries, and a kind of innocence in how James eases us into the story through the mind of an eighteen-year-old whose day-to-day thoughts are dominated by music and masturbatory fantasies, the ordinary preoccupations of being young.

The Attack and the Many Meanings of "Disappearers"

Eddy answers an ad to join a small group of gay men planning to stage "Fortune and Men's Eyes," John Herbert's 1967 play about a young man's experience of prison, homosexuality and domination. They're meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1988, in a climate of open homophobia, which makes even their private rehearsals dangerous, let alone the ambition of staging the play publicly. That danger catches up with them: the group is horrifically attacked by a homophobic mob, and not everyone survives. Many who do are left severely damaged, physically and emotionally. It’s striking that the author doesn’t allow the attackers to remain an amorphous group; their individual thoughts and each person’s sense of self-justification for committing such a horrendous act is recorded.

From there the novel’s title starts accumulating multiple meanings. There are the attackers, who set out quite literally to disappear these men from their community. There's the central mystery of two survivors who vanish in the aftermath, and the efforts of the remaining group to find out what happened to them. Because this is the late eighties and this is gay life, the novel also vividly depicts the reality of the AIDS crisis and the many people who disappeared because of it. And there's a more internal, more painful sense of the word too: queer people disappearing on each other under pressure, as when one half of a couple is arrested for his homosexuality and his partner won't risk bailing him out, afraid of what association with him might cost. Beyond that, there's the way people can disappear into themselves, silencing whole parts of who they are just to survive inside a homophobic world. James has spoken about having lived through some of this era himself, and while I wouldn't call the novel autobiographical, since its actual events aren't drawn from his own life, it clearly belongs to the world he grew up in during the 1980s, and it's steeped in the music and television of that period. I loved seeing "The Cosby Show" and "Family Ties" referenced early on, both shows that shaped my own childhood crushes on Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Michael J. Fox, so that sense of period and coming-of-age is vividly, specifically evoked, alongside an honest reckoning with how much of that same media culture was openly homophobic at the time.

A Demanding Structure With a Purpose

Much of the novel arrives secondhand, through diary entries, interviews and letters rather than immediate first-person action, and a number of readers have found that structure genuinely challenging, since it holds you at a remove from events as they happen. I'd argue that distance is doing real work: for people who disappear, all that's left of their perspective are the fragments they wrote down or the secondhand accounts others give afterward, so piecing together the truth becomes part of the reading experience itself, not just a stylistic choice. Combined with a large cast of shifting points of view and sections often written in patois, which may be more demanding for readers outside the Caribbean, I understand why this book reportedly has a higher did-not-finish rate than most. But I think the difficulty is worth taking on for where the novel ultimately takes you.

Rage, Justice, and the Weight of Real History

There's enormous heart and humanity here, alongside real heartache, pain, violence and rage, and I think that rage is entirely justified. James has described growing up aware of rumours of an attack like this one, and drawing on both his own memory and interviews with queer Jamaicans in shaping the novel, which makes clear this isn't an isolated invention but something many people actually lived through. It's infuriating to read about a situation where the law doesn't just look away from an attack like this but actively participates in it, where going to the police for help might just mean a different, survivable beating rather than none at all. I don't think this belongs safely in the past, either. Living in London today, I'm aware of legal protections gay people have here, but I also remember a report a couple of years ago of a gay couple attacked at a bus stop I go to regularly with my own husband. Seeing the photos of their injuries changed something in me: I still think about it every time I'm at that bus stop, and there are moments when my husband reaches for my hand and I pull away, weighing wanting to be visibly proud of who we are against a very real, very physical fear. That's just a small, present-day echo of the kind of violence this novel is reckoning with on a much larger historical scale.

The novel doesn't offer easy answers to any of this. In large part it's a revenge story, following several characters and survivors down different paths of retaliation, and reading those sections was genuinely horrific on more than one level: the immediate violence of it, but also an uncomfortable flicker of satisfaction at seeing people held to account when the wider structures of society refuse to do so. That response left me with difficult feelings of shame alongside the horror, because I know a cycle of revenge like this can't actually end well, however understandable its origins.

A Complicated, Unflattened Community

I appreciated how honestly the novel portrays the divisions within this group of men even before the attack: different ways of inhabiting queerness, real disagreements among gay men shaped by class, race and relative attractiveness, and the hierarchies those differences create, which raises the harder question of whether "community" is even the right word for what holds them together. One of the most striking sections follows a group known as the Gully Queens, queer individuals pushed to the margins of society who've built a life for themselves literally in the city's gullies. My one small criticism of the novel is that I wish it had spent more time with them; I think it matters enormously that the most marginalised are seen this clearly, even as I understand why James chose to keep his focus centred on this particular group of men. Women are largely peripheral to the story, though it doesn't look away from violence against them either, including a harrowing account of a lesbian couple attacked and a trans woman brutalised and murdered.

The violence throughout is rendered in unflinching, specific detail rather than glossed over the way it often is in film and television, where a gunshot tends to mean an instant, tidy death. James has said he thinks all violence is gratuitous, addressing a common criticism of books like this head-on, but the violence here isn't there to entertain; it's there to testify that real harm like this actually happened, and it continues to do so around the world.

In Conversation With Queer Literature

The novel also meditates on erasure and absence more broadly: one character speculates that if every gay person in Jamaica simply vanished, the society built on their labour and presence would collapse. That immediately brought to mind one of my favourite recent novels, Ibtisam Azem's "The Book of Disappearance," which imagines all Palestinian Arabs vanishing from the state of Israel overnight. It's a reminder of what fiction can do: offering a genuinely different vantage point on the world we already think we know.

Beyond its central themes, I loved how in conversation the novel is with other literature, from an early nod to Mrs. Bennet in "Pride and Prejudice" to a debate between characters over Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, and further back to queer literary forebears like John Rechy, James Baldwin and Jean Genet, writers who were pioneers not just in depicting gay experience explicitly but in modelling ways of actually inhabiting a gay identity. This novel clearly stands in that lineage, extending it with a portrait of gay life that holds real joy alongside real pettiness; there's plenty of bitchiness among these characters too, which felt honest rather than unkind, and a real sense that disappearing from an impossible situation can be freeing even as it carries its own lasting burden. I was also genuinely delighted by a passing reference to Joyce Carol Oates's short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," since Oates is my favourite author, and while I can see the argument that some of these literary references stretch plausibility for characters caught in such desperate circumstances, many of these men are highly literary people for whom reading is exactly the kind of refuge and touchstone you'd expect them to reach for.

A Culmination of a Career

Having followed Marlon James's work for over a decade, this feels like a novel he's been building toward for a long time. "A Brief History of Seven Killings" shares some structural DNA with it and includes gay characters of its own, and his Dark Star fantasy trilogy, two books in so far, also features queer characters and explicit gay sex. I had the privilege of helping judge the year "A Brief History of Seven Killings" was up for the Green Carnation Prize, an award specifically for queer writers, not long after it had already won the Booker; we debated whether a novel that had already won the Booker really needed another prize, but ultimately felt it deserved recognition specifically for how complex and fully realised its gay characters were. James has clearly been writing toward queer life for a long time, including in a 2015 personal essay, "From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself," which I'd recommend alongside the novel; you can feel ideas from that essay finding their fullest expression here.

Verdict

I found this novel mesmerising rather than exhausting, gripped by its twists and turns and by James's language, which brings out the full complexity, contradiction and sheer spark of these characters even in the most difficult circumstances. Is it the novel of the decade? I honestly don't know, but it's an extraordinarily impactful book, and I'm very glad to have read it. I raced through it the first time because I was compelled by the plot and character voices. So I'm looking forward to returning to it more slowly at some point to more deeply take in everything it has to offer. I'd recommend it wholeheartedly, but readers should know what they're signing up for: there's real explicit violence and sex in these pages, though never without purpose. If you've read it, I'd love to know where you land: masterpiece, or overhyped?


Read more of my reviews on my book blog LonesomeReader or check out the videos on my BookTube channel or consider joining my Bookclub

[Celine · Rating 4 out of 5]

perhaps the most challenging book i’ve ever read. i’m very glad i did—it’s a total feat, and will undoubtably accumulate well-deserved praise.

that being said, i don’t know if i’d be able to read it again, any time soon. it’s enormously difficult to sit with and, at over 600 pages, you sit with the violence and brutality for quite a while.

it’s ultimately an urgent and necessary read. heavy, yes, but intentional down to the last punctuation mark.

[Dennis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving, thought-provoking, epic. The Disappearers is a book that will stay with me forever. The journey is long and windy, and will be compared to A Little Life, but there's so much to learn from this reading experience. I am at a loss for words.

[jocelyn • coolgalreading · Rating 5 out of 5]

booker prize winner imo

[Tyler Atwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tour de force. I think this is bigger than I have the words for right now. Brutal. Heartbreaking. Completely had me in its grip. As with all of the best door stoppers, I finished it feeling like I needed to come up for air.

[John Caleb Grenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Disappearers is a vicious, angry, violent book that still squeezes in as much biting humor as it can—all while the vibrant characters pour right off the pages into your living room or the park or the beach (or your bed lol 😂) with you while you read.

It’s a frantic, polyphonic hot potato of voices tossing a fiery narrative back and forth and around and around. There are two sections at the end that take this already next level novel and send it into space and eternity as an all time great.

More: This book is deliciously pissed off. It’s risky writing. It isn’t over or under edited. It allows this feeling of real human sentiment through because that’s what’s left sometimes when the world is what it is.

Marlon James has such a rare way of bringing the page to life through voice with sharp emotion reminiscent, to me, of Zora Neale Hurston at her best. I see the word “Dickensian” thrown around here and there for this novel, and though the novel even nods respected tribute to “Bleak House,” I think the rest of the novel’s characters and maybe James might hate having such a sticker stamped on. Either way, those are the sort of legends deserving of comparison and discussion when it comes to a novel such as this.

While literature and storytelling is far more than just some gateway into empathy, I have to think that readers hoping to gain insight into other shoes will appreciate this possibly too-immersive experience of a novel. It’s challenging in its structure, it’s delightful in its voice(s), and its messages are only occasionally subtle in the finding at times, most often loud and clear.

Award lovers, this is the book to beat.

A big thank you to @riverheadbooks for sending me this free copy of the book to review. #thedisappearers

[Jaclyn]

For a novel so brutal, so violent, so full of hate, James uses form in such a playful and elegant way. He captures Kingston in 1988 with homosexuality illegal and the AIDS epidemic haunting and hunting his cast of queer thespians. At so many moments I wanted to look away but James ensured that was never an option and he pressed my hand to the fire. This book is a epistolary masterpiece of rage and survival in a world that hates you. The prose is so strong and grounded in a homosexual Caribbean vernacular that brings electrical sparks to the long novel. In terms of The Booker I don’t see how this can’t win. James’s dexterity and virtuosity as a writer is on full display. This book is a comittment but it’s one I was so grateful to devote myself to. Like Angel Down, it transcends itself, what it is, through form. It does things only fiction can do. And for that, I think we have our Booker winner.

[Joy D · Rating 3 out of 5]

James is confronting homophobia and examining the psychological effects of trauma. To do that he has written a book filled with explicit sex and graphic violence. It is deliberately provocative. I can appreciate his point, and I can also say I would not have read this novel without its nomination to the Booker longlist. Pick it up only if this kind of content is something you can handle. It is not my type of book at all.

The book does what James sets out to do but I did not enjoy reading it.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was one of the most intense books I’ve read in a long time. It was, at times, a difficult read but also an important and timely one.

Set in Jamaica during the late 1980s and 1990s, The Disappearers begins with a group of gay men rehearsing for a stage play. When a violent mob attacks them, their lives splinter in ways that extend far beyond the physical brutality of that night. What follows is less a story about the attack itself than about its aftermath: grief, guilt, trauma, and revenge. It’s also about the many ways people disappear, whether by force, by fear, or simply by trying to stay alive.

Marlon James refuses to soften any of it. The violence is graphic, the sexual content is explicit, and the emotional weight is constant. This is not a novel interested in making its readers comfortable, and I think that’s entirely the point. James is forcing us to confront a history that has too often been ignored and to witness the devastating effects of hatred and systemic homophobia. The brutality isn’t gratuitous; it’s integral to the story he’s telling.

There were moments that were incredibly powerful, particularly in the way James explores the lingering effects of trauma. I also appreciated the novel’s structure, which gradually reveals what happened from multiple perspectives and shows how one horrific event ripples through so many lives. The title itself takes on multiple meanings as the story unfolds, touching not only on those who literally vanish, but on erased identities, silenced histories, and lives lived in the shadows.

That said, this wasn’t a book I would say enjoyed reading. It was almost unrelentingly intensity, and I often found myself needing to put it down before I was ready to continue. While I admired what James was doing, I struggled to fully connect with the characters amid the sheer heaviness of the material.

However, I have no doubt this book will resonate deeply with many readers, especially those who appreciate literary fiction that asks difficult questions and refuses easy answers. For me though, I respected the novel more than loved it.

[Misha · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1988 Kingston, Jamaica, a mob attacks a group of eight gay men rehearsing a queer play. This horrific act of homophobic violence lies at the heart of the novel as we follow the victims, some of whom disappear literally, others who disappear while remaining very much present, across nearly two decades.

A favourite of 2026 and, I suspect, a favourite of a lifetime. The last sentence of this book made me weep and it left me paralysed with a sense of grief… I ended up reading that sentence again and again. The experience of reading The Disappearers has been difficult difficult difficult in ways I can barely express.

There is the physical violence at the heart of the novel, but there are other forms of violence too - rage, trauma, memory, grief, the loss of self, and the constant fear of merely existing as a self that is socially unacceptable. There is also the violence of what the book evokes beyond its pages, of what queer people are living through right now, especially those with the most marginalised identities. It is difficult to think about the word "happy" in "Happy Pride" while living through fascism.

James's writing is visceral, as always. It gets under your skin in the most uncomfortable ways. Yet the novel is not without joy or hope. Reading it made me want to laugh, then cry, then laugh again, then cry again. It is so jarring, so beautiful, and so tender even in its most brutal moments. The structure, the narrative voices, and the dialogue all work together to create a feeling that shifts between discomfort, exhilaration, and profound grief. It is one of those books I wish I could consume completely, so that some part of it can remain with me forever.

[Beth]

I would like to thank Net Galley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book had me in a chokehold.

I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. I consumed A Brief History of Seven Killings and I also read Black Leopard, Red Wolf. I thought I knew what to expect. I was wrong. I wish I could have read this book in paperback. I did miss flicking back to the character list in previous books.

I think it does follow a certain formula that Marlon James excels in. There are a string of characters and lots of plotlines going on but with one plotline that is at the heart of the story. You have no idea what's going on for a while until you do. Then, it hits you.

I found this book extremely difficult. I normally binge read a book and found I couldn't do this. Perhaps, this is because I was reading this book at my most busiest, stressful time at work or maybe it was this book. This book haunted me. I thought about it whilst I was doing other things and I craved its return.

The title is so clever.
Have you disappeared if no one misses you?

I am still in a state after the ending. I don't know what else to say but read it.

[Baker · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't enjoy this one. The story I cared about (the tragedy of the gay life in Jamaica) is filtered through annoying characters and storytelling gimmicks that cheapen the message and made this an annoying read. The author chose to frame part one as diary entries yet is written in a way in which nobody would ever write a diary entry. It's not believable as a diary. Above that, the story is further buried under literal entire chapters about porn and masturbation. For a book that I assume is advocating for gay justice all of the characters feel like cheap stereotypes whose only interests are being bitchy and argumentative and having LOTS of sex in the milieu of perverted kink and drug parties. While their tragic backstories were meant to give the characters depth, it didn't. "My dad never loved me" or "I hate myself" is not depth, it's basic motivation. I'm not a prude but I don't want to read about 400 ways to have an orgasm while I'm trying to learn about this world. This book is nothing but porn magazines, cliches, stereotypes, and endless references to 80's tv shows and music. For an author with so much accolade I expected something much better than this. Is this a case where people are giving high ratings just because they feel like they're supposed to?

[Paromita · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Disappearers is a towering achievement in fiction. Marlon James chronicles the unspeakable atrocities that homosexual individuals in Jamaica faced outside the home and within it, for the "crime" of being themselves.

We follow a group of eight men who come together to rehearse for a play about gay men in prison and are brutally attacked for doing so. We get multiple perspectives - from the protagonists to the attackers, horrifying and heart-wrenching in their detailing of the violence and brutality.

Marlon James is unwavering in his determination to describe the relentless humiliation and persecution that began right from the school years and continued lifelong. And the reader cannot look away either. It seems like the only option left to our protagonists and others is to disappear. In a way, this book is a chronicle of the multi-faceted nature of such disappearances - be it withdrawing from society, killing one's sense of self or ceasing to exist altogether. As James asks at one point in the book through one of the protagonists - can one really disappear if one's absence is not noticed at all?

I had to put this book down multiple times while reading, such was the emotional impact. Having read Book of Night Women and Brief History of Seven Killings by the same author, it seems thematically apt that James would render this subject with such care. I consider this to be his best work so far and indeed, one of the best books I have read.

A strong recommendation to any reader for this unflinching portrayal of how much a marginalised community endures and what it does to them, day by day, year after year, decade after decade. The star rating system falls short of expressing how I feel about this book - it will suffice to say that The Disappearers left me devastated and speechless.

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for the Booker Prize 2026. Was torn between 3 and 4 stars for this one but decided to go with the latter due to there being scenes in this book that are really going to stick with me and the sheer power of them. There were moments during reading this which felt like a bit of a slog to me, and other moments I felt completely sucked into and overwhelmed by. I never really got used to the narrative voice which I think was my main barrier, but the sheer vastness of this novel had amazed me. It was a difficult read - it is gruesomely violent and saddening, and I found certain segments of the book to be quite bloated meaning at times I found it hard to want to pick back up again. But it is a book upon finishing I can’t help but feel like I’ve witnessed something great being told. This is my first Marlon James book and so I will be interested to see how I fair with his other work.

[Gregg Rosenthal · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are moments of transcendence, but there are far more of brutality.

James is so effective communicating the pain of his characters that it was difficult to get through at times.

[quillnqueer]

I maintain that this book is a masterpiece, I think it's winning the Booker, but this is so slow and so heavy. It's also... 600+ pages of descriptive gay sex. I'm invested in the murder investigating but the characters keep getting distracted by having more gay sex. Like. Can we focus. Please.

[LindaJ^ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was torture to read. It has a lot of value but it is explicit in oh so much -- especially violence and sex. It is on the longlist for the 2026 Booker. It would be a legitimate winner but I so did not enjoy it.

[Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to the publisher for the gifted eARC.

Reading this book is a rollercoaster. I started out thinking it would be a funny book. Then it got dark. Then really violent — to the point where I wanted to stop reading. At one point, it was so intense I genuinely thought about never picking it up again. And then, just when I thought I had settled into it, I was hit with an ending that left me in tears.

And it was so worth it.

Set in 1980s Jamaica, eight men decide to put on the country’s first openly gay play as the country grapples with homophobia. But after a brutal attack, each man is forced to confront his fate, identity, and place in a society that refuses to accept him. Some choose to disappear, some choose to investigate those who disappeared, and one… I’ll leave that surprise for you.

At its core, DISAPPEARERS examines what it means to disappear — in families that reject you, in a country that refuses to see you, and in a society that denies your right to exist.

DISAPPEARERS exposes the violence and cruelty faced by gay men in 1980s/90s Jamaica. James doesn’t shy away from depicting, often in graphic detail, the harm inflicted on the queer community, as well as the ways violence can also emerge within it.

The multiple POVs and shifts in time add depth to the story, showing how class, race, and generation shape how these men understand themselves and each other. (It’ll probably make for an easier reading experience to have a physical copy). The novel also forces the reader to sit with the aftermath of the attack and the different ways each survivor responds to it. James is especially skilled at giving each voice a distinct texture, allowing the reader to fully inhabit each perspective despite the complexity of the narrative structure.

At times, DISAPPEARERS became so emotionally intense that I felt physically ill and had to look away. And that feels entirely deliberate — James’ writing almost dares the reader to keep going.

Because it is so easy to look away. To assume we already know enough. To dismiss it as “unnecessary violence.” To believe we are powerless, and therefore only observers.

But that desire to look away is exactly what the book refuses to allow.

DISAPPEARERS explores guilt, grief, rage, and shame through a layered narrative that demands a lot from its readers. It is a novel that takes time to read, and even more time to sit with. A devastating, passionate work that asks difficult questions about complicity, culpability, and what it means to witness suffering without turning away.

And maybe that’s why I almost wanted to stop reading. Because sometimes the hardest thing a book can ask you to do is keep looking.

I would love to see DISAPPEARERS win the Booker prize, because that’ll encourage more readers to engage with a difficult text like this. (But I think it has more NBA vibes than Booker 😅)

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Disappearers by Marlon James — ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This book felt disturbingly familiar to me from the very first pages, because I couldn't stop thinking about the environment I live in — a place with real, deep-rooted homophobic sentiment toward the LGBTQ community. Being gay here still carries consequences: people are treated differently, denied opportunities, looked at with suspicion or contempt simply for who they are. I've talked to friends about this, and the sentiments they've expressed to me echo what James puts on the page, just with less overt violence. Reading this book made that connection uncomfortably real.

The novel opens in Kingston, 1988, when eight strangers begin rehearsing Fortune and Men's Eyes, a play about power and desire in prison — set to become Jamaica's first openly gay production. One night, a mob attacks them. One man is killed. Two disappear entirely. What follows is less a single narrative than a sprawling, formally ambitious mosaic — journals, diary entries, interviews, letters, including chapters written from inside the perspective of the men in the mob itself. That structural choice is what makes the book so unsettling and so effective: it doesn't let you stay comfortably on one side of the violence.

The passage written from the mob's perspective is the one that shook me the most. The anger, the disgust toward gay men that James renders there felt true in a way I recognized immediately — not because I've felt it myself, but because I've heard it, almost verbatim, from people around me. It's terrifying how contemporary that hatred still reads, even now, decades after the novel is set. The description of the attack itself is unflinching and genuinely difficult to get through — dark, ugly, and heartbreaking in a way that stayed with me long after I put the book down.

What the novel does just as powerfully is track the aftermath — how differently people carry trauma. Some respond with anger and a hunger for retribution. Some try to erase themselves, disappear, become unseen. Others live out the rest of their lives marked permanently by what was done to them, physically and otherwise. Running underneath all of it is the early AIDS crisis, adding another layer of fear and stigma onto men who were already being hunted for who they were.

This is a dense, claustrophobic, demanding read — the Jamaican patois took real time to settle into, and I'll admit the first eighty pages or so were a genuine adjustment. But once I found my footing in the voice, the book opened up into something remarkably wide-reaching: a story about living and dying, hatred and love, and the particular terror of having to hide who you are just to stay safe. It resonated with me far more than I expected going in, precisely because so little of what it depicts feels like history.

[Lulu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I genuinely believe Marlon James is one of the greatest writers of our time. He’s certainly one of the greatest I’ve read and easily one of my top five writers of all time. His ability to construct a story, create characters who feel completely alive, and pull you into their world is undeniable.

He pulls me into a story. He gets me comfortable. He makes me laugh. He lets me settle into the lives of his characters, and then, out of nowhere, he punches me directly in the gut. It’s almost like he’s saying, Yo, wake up. Don’t get too comfortable. I’m telling you a real-ass story.

The Disappearers was no different.

Set primarily in Jamaica and spanning several years, the novel centers around a group of young men brought together to perform a controversial play about homosexuality. During one of their rehearsals, they are brutally attacked by a group that includes a famous musician, members of his posse, and members of the police. What happens that night is horrific, and what follows is tragedy after tragedy.

Because of who these men are—or, more specifically, because of who society believes them to be—there is very little outrage over what happens to them. Their sexuality doesn’t just make them targets of the violence; it makes their suffering easier for everyone else to dismiss. And that’s where this novel becomes so much bigger than the attack itself.

The Disappearers is about homosexuality, identity, family, friendship, religion, masculinity, mental health, AIDS, violence, revenge and, above everything else, survival.

These men are navigating a world where simply being suspected of being gay can put them in danger. Being seen with the wrong person, being in the wrong neighborhood, looking at another man the wrong way—any of it can make you a target. You can be beaten, arrested, thrown out of your home, humiliated or killed, and the people who are supposed to protect you may be some of the very people participating in the violence against you.

James doesn’t sanitize any of this for the reader. The language is ugly because the world these men are living in is ugly toward them. The slurs are there. The homophobia is there. The violence is graphic. The sex is graphic. The cruelty is there in all of its ugliness. But so is the humanity.

There’s friendship. There’s love. There’s sex and laughter and foolishness. There are moments when these men are simply young men trying to live their lives. And I think that’s part of what makes the darkness hit as hard as it does. James allows you to see them as complete human beings while constantly reminding you how easily the world around them can decide that their humanity doesn’t matter. And despite everything that happens in this book, there was never a moment when I thought James was pushing something simply for shock value. I never found myself saying, Okay, come on now. You’re doing too much.

The Disappearers is an epic novel. It’s dark, difficult, graphic, heartbreaking, funny in places, and deeply human. It’s a book that asks you to have patience and trust where James is taking you. And if you can do that, I think it’s worth every second.

For me, this was easily a five-star read.

At this point, Marlon James could announce that he’s writing a 600-page novel about Little Miss Muffet sitting on her damn tuffet, and I’d be somewhere looking for the preorder link. Whatever this man writes, I’m reading it.

★★★★★

[esmereadsalot · Rating 5 out of 5]

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