In his 2022 novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Shehan Karunatilaka crafts a world where reality is more surreal than anything the imagination could conjure. Set against the chaos of Sri Lanka’s civil war, the novel blends noir, political satire, and ghost stories into a narrative that both confronts and transcends history. Through the eyes of Maali Almeida, a war photographer navigating a bizarre afterlife, Karunatilaka dismantles the boundaries between the real and the unreal, showing how the spectres of history linger long after conflicts cease.

Maali, finding himself in a liminal space between life and death, is tasked with solving his own murder within seven days or ‘moons’. Yet the novel’s true mystery lies in how it captures the disorienting overlap of trauma and truth, where the horrors of war bleed into a spectral, satirical purgatory.

In this session, Karunatilaka reads excerpts from his work, allowing his words to animate this unsettling terrain where the living and the dead converse, and where history’s unhealed wounds haunt the present. The subsequent discussion probes how the surreal is not a departure from reality but rather a means to confront it more truthfully. What happens when the most outlandish fiction merely mirrors the absurdity of the real world? How can storytelling serve as a bridge between what is seen and what is felt—between history’s recorded truths and its lingering ghosts?