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The Disappearers
Written by Marlon James
- Longlisted
- The Booker Prize 2026
- Published by Hamish Hamilton
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A deeply human story of men who must make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands
In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a play. The men are strangers to one another and each has a different reason for being involved. But they all share one inescapable truth: All of them are gay-a ‘batty man’ in Jamaican argot-and all of them must contend with the dangers that such a truth lays bare.
One night a mob savagely attacks them, killing one of the men. For the survivors, their recovery is as much emotional as it is physical: As their bodies heal, each man must grapple with the violence, the hatred, and the rage that the attack made plain. Some try to ignore what the attack has unearthed, while others double down on retribution.
The Disappearers is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.
The Disappearers was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026.
Marlon James
Marlon James won the Booker Prize in 2015. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica
More about Marlon James A book that examines territory Caribbean literature has rarely dared to occupy, as what begins as a theatrical story becomes something closer to a reckoning. James is a singular literary talent
The Booker Prize 2026 judges
What the judges said
‘The Disappearers is among Marlon James’s most ambitious and history-making works, a novel that examines territory Caribbean literature has rarely dared to occupy. Beginning in late 1980s Kingston, it follows eight male actors rehearsing what is billed as Jamaica’s first openly gay play. When the men become victims of brutal homophobic violence, the novel shifts register: in the years that follow, one survivor sets out to investigate the fates of the others, and what begins as a theatrical story becomes something closer to a reckoning.
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 Disappearers could be read as a long overdue, clear-eyed confrontation with Jamaican homophobia: unflinching in its honesty, but written with the full complexity and love of someone who knows the place and its contradictions from the inside.’
What the critics said
Kirkus
‘As in his Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), James brings multilayered life to a troubling era in his homeland’s recent history. He engages with his landscapes and the diverse characters populating them with intensity, passion, and bountiful, often graphic detail. With the same affinity for Dickensian storytelling he’s shown in his sword-and-sorcery epics, James tells this searingly realistic tale through interview fragments, journal entries, letters, and, in recreating the horrific attack, with random, frantic voices that leave unsettling echoes.
Even when it stress-tests your senses, this sprawling depiction of gay life in Jamaica is galvanizing.’
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