Dwight Garner reviews THE DISAPPEARERS, by Marlon James. He states, “Marlon James’s story of gay experience and murderous homophobia in Jamaica is a maximalist’s banquet — and the Booker Prize winner’s finest book yet.” He considers this book to be “a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far.” [And to steal a line from Garner’s article, “Why not just say it?” This is one of the most exciting book reviews I have read this year…] Read the full review in The New York Times (30 August 2026).
In the souk that is contemporary publishing, much attention has gone recently to the minimalists and the tinkerers, to writers of short novels steeped in irony. It’s been a meal of small plates, reflective of short attention spans.
The Jamaican writer Marlon James’s new novel, “The Disappearers,” at 600-plus pages, is instead a maximalist’s banquet: It is humane, blood-flecked, disturbing and sustaining. It takes James 90 pages to say hello. It’s another 70 pages before his story settles into your guts and begins to twist them. It’s yet another 150 before you fully comprehend his loping authority and the scale of his ambitions. Booster rockets fall away. Disparate coordinates begin to converge.
Why not just say it? With this novel about gay experience and murderous homophobia in Jamaica and elsewhere during the 1980s and ’90s, James has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far.
It deserves to be talked about alongside Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” for its tumult of language and its crisscrossing post-colonial themes; Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” (James picks up on a revenge scenario from that novel); and William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” — the greatest American novel, I’d argue — for many reasons but especially for the way James, like Faulkner, hammers his themes like a Vulcan, rolling over them relentlessly from new and sometimes oblique angles, advancing and enlarging his attack each time. This is another way of saying “The Disappearers” was one of the signal reading experiences of my adult life. It sank knives deep into my heart. I’m still in recovery from it.
A bonus is that James is casually funny in a way Faulkner rarely is, and his novel has Nirvana and Soundgarden and Duran Duran and Prince cassettes locked into its boom box. It occurred to me around Page 350 that “The Disappearers” places him near the front of the line, a decade or two from now, for the Nobel Prize. [. . .]
The plot of “The Disappearers” is, on the most basic level, easy to relate. It’s about eight young Black and mixed-race men in Kingston who gather in private, in 1988, to rehearse a dangerous play: John Herbert’s “Fortune and Men’s Eyes” (1967), about prison life and degradation and sex acts both desired and not. (One character refers to it as “‘Lord of the Flies’ with big people.”) Most if not all the actors are closeted gay men.
A rehearsal is raided, in a scorchingly violent scene — teeth are scattered like diamonds, bones are broken, eyes gouged out — by a homophobic mob. (Jamaica being Jamaica at the time, the marauders are treated as heroes.) This episode, a novella all its own, is related from the point of view of the predators and functions like the initial break shot in a game of pool. [. . .]
For full review, see https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/30/books/review/the-disappearers-marlon-james.html
Also see our previous posts https://repeatingislands.com/2026/08/20/forthcoming-book-the-disappearers/ and https://repeatingislands.com/2026/08/22/book-event-an-evening-with-marlon-james-in-conversation-with-kei-miller/
[Above, cropped detail from the original NYT photo by Alain Le Garsmeur/Alamy: Kingston Harbor, Jamaica, in 1982.]