Marlon James’s sweeping 640-page novel The Disappearers
has landed on the 13-book longlist for the 2026 Booker Prize. The rigorous literary fiction work offers a scorching exposé of homophobia and the AIDS epidemic across 1980s Kingston, Jamaica.
Following his landmark 2015 victory for A Brief History of Seven Killings
, author Marlon James stands among the 13 writers longlisted for the international fiction award. Selected from 163 submissions by a panel chaired by classicist and writer Mary Beard, the £50,000 award recognizes the year’s finest original novel written in the English language and published in the U.K.
Rehearsing Danger in 1980s Kingston: The Plot of The Disappearers
Set in 1980s Jamaica, The Disappearers centres on eight gay men who come together clandestinely in Kingston to rehearse a staging of John Herbert’s 1967 gay prison play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes
. Their objective, articulated by director Havelock Titus, is to dismantle the whole fragile myth of Jamaican male sexuality
by holding up a mirror to a society marked by intense homophobia.
The narrative opens through the diary entries of Eddy Porteous, a “white-ish” Belgian-Jamaican college student from a well-heeled family who details the complex interplay of class, race, and colourism among the troupe. But the initial camaraderie fractures when a mob brutally attacks the group.
“James is a singular literary talent. His dialogue is sharp and propulsive, his phrasing is poetic, visceral and capable of moving from the painful to the darkly hilarious within a single exchange.”
The Booker Prize Jury
Their investigation unfolds against the devastating backdrop of the AIDS epidemic in Kingston, a crisis described in the novel as an unfolding sequence of erasures where friends, bodies, and names vanish piece by piece.
A Polyphonic Structure and Ruthless Exploration of Violence
James constructs the 640-page novel through a shifting, polyphonic architecture that incorporates diary entries, interview transcripts with an American media outlet, and a chorus representing the minds of the perpetrators themselves. Among the attackers are a policeman, a self-loathing closet case, a deacon, and a reggae singer named Streggeh Don whose fictional hit track, Batty Is Not Pussy
, serves as a rallying cry for the violence.
Reviewers note that while violence remains a signature element of James’s bibliography—spanning The Book of Night Women
and the Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings
—the carnage here is anchored by an explicit moral inquiry. I think evil is a choice,
one survivor observes in the text, framing the atrocities as deeply volitional acts rather than mindless chaos.
The 2026 Booker Prize Field and What Comes Next
The longlist was chosen by a jury comprising Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu, Patricia Lockwood, and chair Mary Beard.
James shares the longlist with fellow former winner Douglas Stuart, who is nominated for John of John
, a story set on the Hebridean island of Lewis and Harris, as well as authors from seven countries and three continents including Elizabeth Strout, M. John Harrison, and debut novelists Kenan Orhan, Rebecca Perry, and Djamel White.
