Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Being a ghost isn’t that different to being a war photographer. Long periods of boredom interspersed with short bursts of terror.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

by Leave a Comment

Malinda (Maali) Almeida is dead. He’s just taking his sweet time working it out. No, he’s not still hallucinating from some “silly pills” a friend might have slipped him; he is well and truly dead, and he has no idea how that came to pass? Maali is—or was—the son of a Sinhalese father and a Burgher mother. A closeted gay man with a gambling problem, he was also a photographer who served many masters during the political upheaval of 1980s Sri Lanka. As a man […]

“Even the afterlife is designed to keep the masses stupid.”

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

by Leave a Comment

Bingo: Asia/Oceania; Passport: Sri Lanka Maali Almeida is dead.  He can’t remember exactly what happened, and it takes a while for the reality of his situation to sink in.  Death is confusing, a bureaucratic maze with rules that everyone seems to expect him to already know, and forms that must be filled in before his seven days are up and he must choose what happens next. Maali desperately wants to know how he died.  He can follow his body through the ghost-ridden streets of Colombo […]

“every death is significant, even when every life appears not to be”

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

by Leave a Comment

I am exhausted: extremely jet-lagged and just submitted materials for my first major deadline of 2023. So what better to do than to review the last book I read in 2022 (finished at approximately 9:30 PM on New Year’s Eve, yes I know how to party), the Booker Prize-winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida? 2022 was actually my best year when it comes to attacking the Booker longlist; I read three of the nominees, and all of them were really excellent novels, in extremely divergent ways. […]

Life: it’s not nothing

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida: A Novel by Shehan Karunatilaka

by 1 Comment

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is the winner of this year’s Booker Prize. Set in 1980s Sri Lanka, the action takes place amidst the violence of Tamils versus Sinhalese versus Indians, not to mention a variety of outside groups and organizations connected to them. The main character is a photographer and gambler, the gay son of Burgher/Tamil mother and Sinhalese father. Maali Almeida says he is not on any side partaking in the violence in Sri Lanka, that his goal is to take the […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo