A third of the way into the new Marlon James novel, The Disappearers, the rehearsal collapses, and the seven men in the room start telling each other the worst thing that has ever happened to them.
One says a friend’s house was set alight around him with people waiting at both doors, and that he lived because he squeezed under the floorboards, and that he carries a cross-shaped burn where a beam pinned his back.
One says nobody has ever laid a hand on him. Seven years of school, and all anybody did was call him a girl’s name and start catwalking whenever he came down the corridor, and at the end of it he stood on a pier in Kingston Harbour and thought about the water.
And one tells his laughing. Cannot stop laughing, keeps patting his own chest to get the sentences out, while he describes the five neighbours who kicked his door in, gagged him with a rag soaked in furniture polish, carried him past adults who looked the other way, and shovelled dirt onto him in an open grave.
Nobody in that room has anything to say afterwards. Neither did I.
Marlon James Buries the Lede on Purpose
The set-up of The Disappearers by Marlon James is almost cheerful. Kingston, May 1988. An impresario in a velvet jacket decides to stage the first openly gay play in Jamaican history, a Canadian prison drama translated into patois, in a house that looks abandoned. Anybody who shows up gets a part, because so few show up.
Our narrator for that stretch is Edmond Porteous, eighteen, mixed, uptown, with a Belgian mother who keeps announcing that she is a modern woman and a father who is sleeping with a schoolgirl from Eddy’s own year. Eddy keeps a diary. It is funny and filthy and it belongs to a boy who has decided that being clever will be enough.
It will not be enough. One night the house is raided. I am not going to walk you through what follows. I will only say that Marlon James narrates the whole of it from the other side, in a dozen short testimonies by the men who did it, and that after forty pages of that I put the book face down and went and stood in the garden.
Marlon James Lets Nobody Speak Twice
Here is the thing I want to press on people. Five parts, five entirely different modes, and no narrator gets a second turn.
A diary. Then the attackers. Then, six years on, a first-person account from a survivor, spliced with tape transcripts from a journalist trying and failing to write the case up for an American magazine. And then a bundle of letters from 1999, sent from a house in the hills down to a friend in London, in a voice so arch and so wounded that I started rationing them.
One of those letters is in Polari, the coded English that gay men in mid-century Britain used to talk in front of the police. It runs for pages. Very little of it is glossed. It is a party trick, and it is also the whole argument of the book, which is that people who cannot be seen build a second language and then die still speaking it.
The fifth part is 2005. I will say only that it is written in the second person and that the last line made me sit very still.
Marlon James Is Also, Astonishingly, Very Funny
Nobody prepared me for this and I want to prepare you.
Eddy and his younger sister, fourteen and merciless, negotiating over her boyfriend and her Walkman and their mother’s state of mind, are as good as any brother-and-sister writing I have read in years. There is a night out at a members’ pool that calls itself a club, run by a married couple with an arrangement, where the total attendance is fifteen and one of them is already too drunk to stand. It reads like the best kind of stand-up.
And the stage manager, condescended to by everyone for a hundred pages, gets exactly one speech. It is a curse laid on the boy who destroyed his adolescence, it runs to nearly a page, and it finishes by wishing him a life so mediocre he will not even qualify as a proper son of a bitch. The room jumps. So did I.
Where Marlon James Loses the Thread
The third part is very long and it goes round.
It takes up close to half the novel and it is doing three things at once: the survivors searching Kingston for the two who vanished, an affair between one of them and a man he has every reason to want dead, and those tape transcripts. All three are strong. All three get circled three or four times, and the transcripts especially could lose a good chunk without costing anything. The journalist herself is a device. She is there to ask questions so the narrator will answer them, and when she stops appearing we never find out what became of the piece she gave three years to.
The two disappearances are not treated equally either. One of the missing men gets an entire late movement of the book. The other gets a mother, a sister, and an errand. There is very likely a deliberate point buried in that, about which of the two a country would bother searching for, and it still felt like something dropped rather than something withheld.
One more thing, flagged rather than criticised. The Disappearers by Marlon James is the most punishing book on the Booker Prize 2026 longlist by some distance: sustained homophobic and racist violence, a killing that involves sexual mutilation, a blinding rendered on the page, arson with a person inside, a woman attacked by a group as a punishment for being a lesbian, a trans woman killed at a street dance, two boys sexually abused by adults, a mercy killing, an AIDS death in a drain, kidnap, suicide, and explicit sex throughout. If any of that sits close to home, Galop is a better next step than the next chapter.
The Marlon James Scene I Keep Coming Back To
Fleeing a crowd, two characters drop into the drainage gullies beneath Kingston and are rescued by a trans woman in red platform heels who can outrun a mob through a sewer while wearing them. Under a bridge there turns out to be a whole society: teenagers put out by their families, nobody over twenty-five, wigs and torn denim and salvaged mattresses, living off what gets thrown away behind the American businesses because the local restaurants leave nothing.
It is the only community of its kind the novel offers anyone, and it is a storm drain. That is the most eloquent thing Marlon James does in six hundred pages, and he does it without a word of comment.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
Go to A Brief History of Seven Killings if you somehow have not, because it is the same city narrated by everybody at once and it shows you how long this writer has been building toward this. The Book of Night Women is the better pick if the sentences rather than the architecture are what hooked you. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is the honest comparison for scale and for damage, and I say that as somebody who argues with that book constantly. And if you want the play at the centre of it all, John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes is short and has stayed in print since 1967.
Where It Leaves You
Late on, one of the survivors tries to explain what it costs to vanish deliberately. It does not mean going up in smoke, he says. It means working out exactly where people have already agreed not to look, and then living there.
Everybody in The Disappearers by Marlon James is doing some version of that. The ones who ran. The ones who stayed and got married. The scholarship boy who had to be at school by six so nobody would see him get off the bus. Even the attackers, who go home and never think about it again, which turns out to be the injury that never closes. Not that they did it. That they do not recall doing it.
I finished The Disappearers by Marlon James at two in the morning and did not want to talk to anybody for a day. It is exhausting, it is far too long in the middle, and I would not give up a page of the rest. Nothing else on this year’s list is even attempting what Marlon James has done.