The Disappearers: Marlon James in conversation with Doug Jones

Charis and the Georgia Center for the Book welcome Marlon James in conversation with Doug Jones for a celebration of The Disappearers.
This is an in-person only event and registration is required. RSVP at the link above. This event takes place at the First Baptist Church of Decatur, 308 Clairemont Avenue Decatur, GA 30030. Doors open at 6:30pm. Event begins promptly at 7:00pm.
Charis and the Georgia Center for the Book welcome Marlon James in conversation with Doug Jones for a celebration of The Disappearers, a propulsive novel about the murder of a gay man in 1980s Jamaica and its tragic consequences.
In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a play. The men are strangers to one another and each has a different reason for being involved. But they all share one inescapable truth: All of them are gay―a “battyman” in Jamaican argot―and all of them must contend with the dangers that such a truth lays bare.
One night a mob savagely attacks them, killing one of the men. For the survivors, their recovery is as much emotional as it is physical. As their bodies heal, each man grapples with the violence, the hatred, and the rage that the attack made plain. Some try to ignore what the attack has unearthed, while others double down on retribution.
In The Disappearers, Marlon James has written a riveting and deeply human story of men forced to make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands. It is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.
About the author
Marlon James is the Booker Prize–winning and New York Times bestselling author of A Brief History of Seven Killings; the bestselling and National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf; as well as the bestselling Moon Witch, Spider King; The Book of Night Women; and John Crow’s Devil. In addition to the Booker Prize, James’s novels have won the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, and have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the NAACP Image Award. In 2019, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. Born in Jamaica, James lives in New York City.
About the conversation partner
Doug Jones is an alumnus of Morehouse College and received his MFA from Columbia University. His debut novel, The Fantasies of Future Things (Simon & Schuster, April ’25) was longlisted for both the 2026 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the 2025 First Novel Prize. His work has been included in the anthologies Black Love Letters (Zando Projects / Get Lifted Books), Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature & Art (Third World Press) and Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS (Other Countries Press). He has written for Black Issues Book Review and Venus Magazine. An inaugural fellow of the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, Doug’s early work received recognition from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Doug lives in Atlanta, GA.