Overview
- The Observer highlighted The Disappearers as its Book of the Week and noted the novel has been longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.
- Marlon James frames the book as a return to a Jamaica he barely knew and sets much of the story in Kingston during a period when gay men faced real threats of exposure and mob violence.
- In a recent interview James recounted a church 'cleansing' ritual in his youth where preachers laid hands on him in an exorcism-like service that he links to the book’s themes of shame and survival.
- The round-up places The Disappearers within prize-season coverage that also spotlights Matthew Sweet’s Baillie Gifford-longlisted biography of Barbara Cartland and Emma Cline’s Booker-longlisted novel Switzy, which follows a man traveling to Switzerland for assisted dying.
- The Observer’s picks extend beyond contemporary fiction to recommend Frederick Noland’s graphic biography Major Taylor, showing the package’s focus on works that trace marginalised lives and historical injustice.