The Seven Moons of Msaali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

This is the very last of the 2022 Booker Prize long list that I read, and it is also the winner. I started off not loving this, and feeling as I often do, which is that the best of the bunch did not cross the finish line first. This year I am less certain of it--this is a very good book, and it is also a bit unusual in a good way. This is set in Sri Lanka in the 1980's, which is a time of civil unrest and violence, both of which pervade the novel. Maali, the son of a Sinhalese father and a burgher mother, is a freelance photographer who loves his trusted Nikon camera, a gambler in high-stakes poker, a gay man and an atheist. He is not everyone's image of a hero, and at the start of the novel he wakes up dead. The rest of the novel he spends sorting out how exactly this happened to him, and then plotting revenge on those who killed him and how to get the photographs that got him killed out into the world. It is equal parts comic and tragic, so the very best mix, in other words. And in the end, there is always reincarnation.