Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead)
Honorable mention: Even though Marlon James’s third novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead) was published at the end of 2014 and not in 2015, this wild trip through the Jamaican underworld at the height of Bob Marley’s fame won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. In the process, James became the first Caribbean writer to win one of the world’s most prestigious awards since Junot Diaz, of the Dominican Republic, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead).