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Novels Set in Jamaica: What to Read After the 2026 Booker

ByNikki Woods

TL;DR

  • Marlon James’s The Disappearers, set in Kingston from 1988, made the 2026 Booker Prize shortlist. The prize went to M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything on 9 November 2026.
  • It is the third time in sixteen years that a novel set in Jamaica has reached a Booker shortlist, after Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010) and James’s own A Brief History of Seven Killings, which won in 2015.
  • Read those three alongside the Jamaica-set novels prizes have not caught up with: The Book of Night Women, Myal, Augustown and Wide Sargasso Sea.
  • Maroon House Press publishes its own Jamaica-set fiction, including Swift River and Provision Ground. None of our books is connected to the Booker Prize; they appear here as further reading.

Table of Contents

What happened at the 2026 Booker

The Booker Prize 2026 was awarded on Monday 9 November at Old Billingsgate in London. The judges, chaired by Mary Beard, gave it unanimously to M. John Harrison for The End of Everything, a near-future novel set on England’s Channel coast. At 81, Harrison is the oldest winner in the prize’s history.

Jamaica was on the shortlist all the same. Marlon James’s The Disappearers was one of the six finalists, and James was one of two former winners in the running. The novel opens in Kingston in 1988, where eight gay men answer a casting call for what is billed as the island’s first openly gay play. An attack on them shapes everything that follows, across roughly seventeen years and a mix of diaries, interviews and letters. The judges described it as a novel that goes where Caribbean literature has rarely gone. It was also longlisted for the 2026 National Book Award for Fiction in the United States.

If the shortlist sent you looking for more fiction set on the island, this guide is a place to start. We have kept it to novels whose setting is Jamaica itself. For books about Jamaicans abroad, see our guides to Windrush novels and Black British Caribbean novels.

Three Jamaica-set novels the Booker has shortlisted

The Long Song by Andrea Levy (shortlisted 2010)

Levy’s last novel is told by July, born enslaved on the Amity sugar plantation, who looks back on the final years of slavery in Jamaica and the years just after emancipation. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2010 and won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. July is an unreliable, funny and furious narrator, and the book is as interested in who gets to tell the story as in what happened. Our Andrea Levy reading order places it in the rest of her work.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (winner 2015)

James built this novel around the 1976 attempt on Bob Marley’s life, who appears only as “the Singer,” and follows its aftermath across three decades through dozens of voices: gunmen, a CIA man, a journalist, a ghost. When it won in 2015, James became the first Jamaican writer to win the prize. It is long, violent, often written in Jamaican patois, and unusually funny for a book about Kingston’s political violence in the 1970s.

The Disappearers by Marlon James (shortlisted 2026)

Reviewers have called it James’s return to the Jamaica of Seven Killings, and his first Jamaica-set novel since. Where the earlier book is about political gangs, this one is about the men who had to stay invisible in late-1980s Kingston and what it cost them. For more fiction in the same vein, see our list of queer Caribbean fiction to read after The Disappearers, and for the full bibliography, Marlon James’s books in order.

Four more novels set in Jamaica

Prize lists are a narrow window. The Booker only considers novels published in the UK or Ireland and put forward by their publishers, and many of the most important Jamaica-set novels came from small and independent presses. These four belong on any shelf of Jamaican historical and literary fiction.

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James (2009)

Before Seven Killings, James wrote this novel about a revolt planned by enslaved women on a Jamaican sugar estate in the years around 1800. It is brutal and closely observed, and it pairs well with The Long Song: two very different ways of writing the same system.

Myal by Erna Brodber (1988)

Set in the rural district of Grove Town in the early twentieth century, Brodber’s second novel follows Ella O’Grady, a girl of Jamaican and Irish parentage, and the community that draws on Myal, Jamaica’s oldest documented African-rooted religion, to undo the damage done to her. It won the Caribbean and Canada regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1989. Our explainer What Is Myal? gives the history behind the title.

Augustown by Kei Miller (2016)

Miller moves between 1982 and 1920 in a poor community on the edge of Kingston, linking a child’s humiliation at school to the story of Alexander Bedward, the preacher whose followers believed he could fly. It won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in 2017. It works well as a first book-club pick.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)

Rhys gives Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre a past, beginning in Jamaica in the years after emancipation, when the old planter class was falling apart. It is the classic novel of post-emancipation Jamaica written from inside a failing great house. Our guide to books like Wide Sargasso Sea picks up where it leaves off.

Reading Jamaica by era

Read in order of setting rather than publication, these books make a rough history of the island:

  • Slavery and its end, about 1800 to 1840: The Book of Night Women, then The Long Song. For the history behind the plantation novels, see what provision grounds were and our wider list of Jamaican historical fiction.
  • After emancipation: Wide Sargasso Sea.
  • The early twentieth century: Myal, and the 1920 chapters of Augustown.
  • The 1970s and 1980s: A Brief History of Seven Killings, the 1982 chapters of Augustown, and The Disappearers.

Jamaica-set fiction from Maroon House Press

We publish novels set on the island too. They have no connection to the Booker Prize or its judges; we list them because readers who finish the books above often ask what else is set in the same places.

  • Swift River: The Water That Remembers by Lorna Phillips. A Portland valley in 1937, where a woman reads the names of the drowned into the river every November, and her granddaughter can hear the water answer.
  • Provision Ground: The Land They Could Not Prove by Lorna Phillips. A daughter home in Hanover to bury her mother finds surveyors’ stakes in the family yard, and learns the difference between living on land for a hundred years and being able to prove it.
  • The Unsaid by J. Ellen Sussex. A housekeeper in a farming district in the Jamaican hills, the secret she has kept for twenty-three years and the woman she has loved for twenty.

The full list is in our catalog, and our guide to Jamaican novels covers the wider tradition.

Our perspective

A shortlist tells you which books a panel of five readers admired in a given year. It does not tell you what the island’s fiction looks like. Two of the three Jamaica-set Booker books on this list are by one writer, and every one of them was published in London. Many of the novels juries have missed, Brodber’s among them, came from independent presses. Read the Booker books, and then read past them.

Discussion questions

  1. The Long Song and The Book of Night Women cover roughly the same decades. What does each narrator choose to leave out, and why?
  2. Seven Killings and The Disappearers both tell Kingston’s story through many voices. Whose voice is missing from each?
  3. In Myal and Augustown, spiritual practice is treated as fact rather than superstition. How does that change the way history is told?
  4. Which of these novels would you hand to someone who has never been to Jamaica, and which to someone who grew up there?

Keep reading with Maroon House Press

FAQ

Which Jamaican authors have won the Booker Prize?

Marlon James is the only Jamaican writer to have won it, in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings. He was shortlisted again in 2026 for The Disappearers.

Who won the Booker Prize in 2026?

M. John Harrison won on 9 November 2026 for The End of Everything. The Disappearers was one of the five other shortlisted novels.

What is a good first novel set in Jamaica?

Augustown by Kei Miller is a manageable length and moves between two eras. If you want a long book, start with The Long Song.

Are Maroon House Press books connected to the Booker Prize?

No. None of our titles has been submitted to, longlisted or shortlisted for the Booker Prize. We list our Jamaica-set novels here as further reading only.

Sources

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