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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. My guest this week is Shahan Karanatilaka, the author of Seven Moons of Mali Almeida, which won last year's Booker Prize and is now out in paperback.

Shahan, welcome.

Oh, thank you.

Now, this is an unusual book in some respects, because its principal protagonist is dead on page one.

Can you tell me how you made that decision as the basis for this novel?

Well, one was, I suppose, political,

one was just conceptual. I just wanted, I've always liked the murder mystery. And my first book,

Chinaman, everyone says it's a book about cricket, but I think it's a detective story about a missing person.

And this one, I would say, is a murder mystery, a fairly conventional one.

But the only detail being the corpse is the detective.

And so I was attracted to that idea of just to a fairly, I'd say even though there's talking animals and demons and all sorts of shenanigans, it's seven moons, it's the ticking clock, seven days to solve the crime,

plenty of dodgy suspects around, and a few reversals and twists.

But the main twist is, yeah, the detective and the corpse are the same person.

So that was the stylistic reason.

But also, I think I was coming off this cricket book and I wanted to do something completely different.

And this was around 2012, 13, 14, the post-war period for Sri Lanka.

So our 30-year war ended in 2009.

I remember I was in Singapore at the time and we all expected this period

to be, the country would unify and put our differences behind us and go forward. But instead,

there was a lot of bickering on whose fault it was and did civilians die? How many? Who's to

be blamed for that? Were there war crimes? And there was a lot

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