"Whether it was in a plane or a coffin,” author Marlon James wrote in his 2015 essay, “I knew I had to get out of Jamaica.” In his 2026 Booker-shortlisted novel, The Disappearers, we understand the gravity of James’ desperation, his need to escape a place where no queer man, as a character in the novel says, “is living, we’re not even existing. We’re just surviving.” This is James’ second book to be shortlisted for the Booker; he won the prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings in 2015.
Set between 1988 and 2005 and divided into five distinct parts, this polyphonic novel is a tireless examination of Jamaican society, homophobia and male sexuality. It begins with the journal entries of Edmond Porteous, a ‘half-white’ and well-heeled college graduate from Kingston who, along with seven other Black and mixed-race men, is rehearsing a clandestine play based on John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes. According to its director, Havelock Titus, the prison play is fitting for these closeted men to perform because “prison is the ultimate male institution and yet masculine sexualities that could never happen outside in the normal world flourish in there all the time.” When the rehearsals are raided by a violent mob, the attackers are treated as heroes by the media and Jamaican society. We follow the lives of the men as they navigate the aftermath of the gruesome attack, the memories of which become the centre of the novel.
The Disappearers, as the title suggests, is as much about the disappearing acts of gay life as it is about gay life itself. We are let into the shadow world of these men: their sassiness and bawdiness, their courage and insecurities, their escapades in secretive dive bars, their obsession with pop culture, thoughts and feelings they would be too scared to speak out loud. It is as if James, like one of his characters, is asking the reader, “You do realise that there is a Jamaica underneath this Jamaica, right?” The book, however, is hardly a celebration. In the aftermath of the attack, one man is killed after being sexually assaulted with a tree branch; another is blinded, his eyes gouged out; and two disappear “like thieves in the night”, while others attempt to track down the survivors. “You might be surprised to know that it took me ten years to accept the instant viciousness of people who hate us,” one of the survivors, Jordan Brown, tells an American interviewer in the third part.
James has often been criticised for the graphic violence in his novels, including A Brief History of Seven Killings. In The Disappearers, the violence is not merely observed; we are also let into the consciousness of the perpetrators, where it becomes both graphic and psychological. It is palpable and casual, full of swagger, and alert to different shades of hatred: religious, misogynistic, rooted in internalised homophobia (one of the perpetrators is closeted himself), and tied to ideas of manliness. One perpetrator recalls a pride parade that makes him want to “lynch a b***h”. Another wants to make “a charm bracelet out of all the teeth scattered on the floor”. In a letter to his friend, Titus writes that nothing about the mob was mass psychosis, as “each one brought their own little ingenuity to the mix”. As the novel moves from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, the AIDS epidemic engulfs Jamaica’s gay community, adding another layer of violence. Hysteria surrounds the disease, so much so that a local university burns a mattress out of fear of contamination. AIDS compounds the violence, but it also lends the novel a distinct poignancy.
The Disappearers is an unapologetic exploration of survival, trauma, a person’s relationship with desire, and the lure of revenge for those who have been denied their due. For Porteous, Brown and Titus, survival takes different forms, shaped by what the attack has left behind and what each man can bear to live with. Brown, who once lived in a car after his family threw him out, returns to take care of his father’s funeral business but remains consumed by revenge. “Did you know that from 1988 to 1991 I used to drive around at night, looking for somebody, anybody I recognize, just so I could mow them down?” he tells the American interviewer. Havelock retreats to a hillside cottage, “ready to die”, because “once one has accepted life’s only inevitability there comes the wish to die either suddenly or with dignity.” Porteous, meanwhile, the only one absent during the attack, sets out to find the “disappears”.
Moving between journal entries, interviews, monologues and letters, the writing is provocative, visceral, funny, and blunt. Hardly a page goes by without a slur or language that we often hold back, yet there is also tenderness, vulnerability and raw intelligence. James brings his fiction to life through structural ambition, stream of consciousness and his choice of disparate details. He resists the expectation that characters and their thoughts must be coherent or morally tidy. At around 620 pages, the novel doesn’t feel like a long read. Each of its five parts, in fact, reads almost like a novella in its own right. The violence and uneasiness may tire readers looking for an easy read, but James leaves little room for the comfort of looking away.