The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

I’d heard such amazing things about this… but did it match the hype?

This book really beautifully describes the civil wars in Sri Lanka. We follow Maali, a war photographer who is in this sort of purgatory after dying, and he has seven moons to go back and connect with people he loved and figure out how and why he died. We learn that he witnessed the brutaliies of the civil ward in the 1980s at the hands of the government and his photos have captured these atrocities and human rights abuses, including journalists and activists who have mysteriously vanished. Its description of Sri Lankan history is amazing - brutal, emotional, imersive…. but…. the huge number of characters and constant jumping between places and timepoints meant my simple little brain found this very hard to read, particularly in the first half before these stories started to converge into more of a singular narrative.

If a book has so many moving parts that you need to include a glossary of characters, then in my view, there are too many characters but maybe that’s because I’m a simpleton. Enjoyable, like nothing else I’ve read, but at times it hurt my brain and I had to work harder to follow it than I really wanted to.