Marlon James is an uncompromising and exhilarating Man Booker winner

With such disparate books on the shortlist, the judges’ task this year seemed even more difficult than usual. How to choose between a formally experimental history of violence in Jamaica, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, and a deeply humane realist novel about migration from Asia to England, Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways?

Or a novel about family secrets that marks the summation of 50 years delving into the domestic, Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, and a series of cerebral riffs on anthropology, corporate culture and the interconnectedness of modern life, Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island? Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen, a debut mixing folklore and politics in Nigeria, and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, a claustrophobic epic about the scarring effects of childhood abuse on a New York overachiever?

A Little Life was the bookies’ favourite from the start, and would have made Yanagihara the first American winner of a prize that was associated with British and Commonwealth fiction for more than 40 years. But it would also have been a remarkably contentious winner: for all the rapturous reviews and reports of all-night readings and tear-soaked pages, many felt that her 700-page fable of Jude St Francis, a brilliant litigator for whom love, friendship and success as an adult can never redeem a hideous childhood of unremitting sexual abuse, was distasteful, unbelievable, ahistorical or simply overlong.

Instead, A Brief History of Seven Killings is another first: the first winner by a Jamaican author. In choosing Marlon James, the judges have plumped for the most literary novel, and probably the most demanding of the reader – which is saying something given that the list also includes Tom McCarthy. The brutal subject matter is, as the chair of judges Michael Wood said of the shortlist as a whole, “frankly pretty grim”.

But there are huge rewards to be found in this many-voiced kaleidoscopic history of Jamaica’s gang violence and political corruption, which ranges from the 1970s to the 1990s, the ghettos of Trench Town to New York and Miami, and centres on the attempted assassination in 1976 of Bob Marley – referred to only as “the Singer”.

In multiple voices and a multitude of styles and voices we hear from brutalised boys and swaggering gang lords, a CIA operative and a white music journalist, a young woman desperate to escape the island and the ghost of a murdered politician who will haunt it for ever.

Violence crowds the pages, and so does James’s dazzling dexterity with language. You could describe it as a Quentin Tarantino film wrestled down on paper, or a Faulkner novel updated for the 21st century, but as an achievement it stands alone. In the end, that’s what makes it an uncompromising and exhilarating winner.