How not to achieve mythic grandeur in just 620 pages

Marlon James: a man who needs to downsize Pic: Getty

Fiction: Black Leopard, Red Wolf, By Marlon James, Hamish Hamilton, €17.25

Winning the Man Booker Prize is like winning the lottery: it falls on the deserving and the undeserving alike. Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, which won the prize in 2015, was a deserving winner. It had ambition – more than seven hundred pages’ worth of ambition. Spinning an elaborate alternative history from the nucleus of a real event – ...