In early December 1976, seven gunmen stormed Bob Marley's Jamaican home, raking it with gunfire.

Two days later, Marley was to play at the Smile Jamaica concert, which was intended to ease the tensions raised by a bitterly contested election, and then left the country for two years. From that real-life incident, Marlon James has woven an impressive work of fiction, told most powerfully in the voices of young men from the ghetto who have grown up in a kill-or-be-killed world. Alongside them are crime lords, a Rolling Stone journalist, an undercover CIA agent and a woman pregnant with Marley's child, all building up a vivid picture of the gang rivalries and politics of mid-1970s Jamaica and how an uncomfortable Marley fitted into it all. Stretching into the 1990s, with each strand as likely as not to end in a brutal death, this tense and violent, but very compelling, novel is a big book in more ways than one.