The Marvellous Equations of the Dread

The Marvellous Equations of the Dread tells the twin stories of Jamaica’s nihilistic violence and its wondrously creative humanity—and does truthful justice to both. The novel moves through the worlds of the living and the vivid afterlife of the dead, spanning Kingston’s ghettoes, Emperor Haile Selassie’s palace in Addis Ababa, and even London.

"Is me―Bob. Bob Marley."

Reincarnated as the homeless Fall-down man, Bob Marley sleeps in a clock tower built on the site of a lynching in Half Way Tree, Kingston. No one sees that Fall-down is Bob Marley—no one but his long-ago love, the deaf woman Leenah. And in the way of this otherworldly book, when Bob steps into the street each day, five years have passed.

At its heart are human stories: Leenah, who with her mother and daughter tells a powerful woman version of events; Fall-down and his bond with Delroy, an orphaned street-boy; and the surreal meetings between Bob Marley, Marcus Garvey, and King Edward VII—drinking whiskey and playing solitaire in the clock tower.

Not least of the novel’s marvellous equations are the dread revenants who encourage the living to take responsibility for the future of the nation. Written with an ear to music, this novel is a bass track of ancestral memory, a mythical reworking of 300 years of violence, and an inexorable search for freedom—a voyage all the way to the gates of Zion.