“A sense of sweep,” replied Marlon James, when asked what moves him most in literature. “Sweep isn’t just about external journeys, but internal as well. It can be over years and decades, or across land and sea.” If that explanation is still hazy, pick up his mighty new novel, which is longlisted for this year’s Booker prize and is tirelessly – sometimes exhaustingly – grand and peripatetic. Mounting a grisly exposé of Jamaican homophobia, this polyphonic 640-page doorstopper is an emotionally bruising narrative that roves “uptown, downtown, ghetto and gully” through Aids-era Kingston with sidetrack excursions to 1950s England and a closing leap to 2000s United States.

The novel’s defining event is a gruesome mob attack on eight queer men who have clandestinely come together to work on bringing John Herbert’s 1967 gay prison play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, to the stage. The goal, in the words of director Havelock Titus, is to shatter “the whole fragile myth of Jamaican male sexuality”. “Because prison,” he explains, “is the ultimate male institution and yet masculine sexualities that could never happen outside in the normal world flourish in there all the time.”

The spunk and sass of these men, their banter and squabbles as they feel each other out and ease into their roles, as well as their fears, insecurities and motivations for doing the play, are relayed by one of the actors: Eddy Porteous, a “white-ish” Belgian Jamaican college student from a well-heeled family. His diary entries over the course of the month preceding the assault make up the novel’s expositional first quarter, illuminating the interplay of class, race and colourism in the experience of Jamaican queerness.

The narrative kicks into gear with the section on the attack. Now we are thrust, chillingly, into the minds of the perpetrators, among whom are a policeman, a self-loathing closet case, a deacon and a reggae singer named Streggeh Don whose hit, Batty Is Not Pussy, is the rallying-cry-cum-soundtrack for the splatterfest. Violence is James’s shtick and a hallmark of his fiction, from torture and sexual abjection in his subversive slavery epic, The Book of Night Women, and gang warfare in his Booker-winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, to the near-ceaseless carnage in his ongoing Dark Star fantasy trilogy. But here, far from the glib relish of which James has been accused throughout his writing career, one senses an unequivocal ethical purposefulness. “I think evil is a choice,” one survivor asserts, “and an ongoing one. Even in the midst of committing wickedness there are choices of how wicked one will be, which is made by the minute.” In order to grasp this statement in all its wounded, furious profundity – to see the outsize hate unleashed on these men as deeply volitional – the reader must bear witness not only from within the action, but also from within the consciousness of the perpetrators.

One man has a branch shoved into his anus and dies. Another has both his eyes gouged out. All but Eddy, who had skipped rehearsal on that fateful night, are battered, gashed and maimed. Two of them will later vanish without a trace. Wrestling with survivor’s guilt, Eddy teams up with fellow actor Jordan to try to find them. More so than Eddy, it is Jordan who is the novel’s beating heart. A gleeful, foul-mouthed “sometime prostitute”, animated by the dangerous, liberatory ethos of American author John Rechy’s 1977 book The Sexual Outlaw, which he obsessively reads for affirmation, he is the Jamaican homophobe’s “battymonster” come to life.

Jordan and Eddy’s journeys into the promiscuous gay underground and the dark heart of heterosexual Jamaica are recounted in a series of interview transcripts, as the pair take turns speaking to a journalist from an American media outlet. Their frustrations gather further poignancy within the broader tragedy of the Aids epidemic engulfing Jamaica’s gay community: “This is what Aids is after all, isn’t it? One long set of disappearing acts. First is watching the friends and family disappear. Second act is when people try to disappear you. Third act is watching your body vanish from itself and wondering where the fuck you going, piece by piece, until all of you gone … If there is a fourth act it’s when everybody erase your name as if you were never born in the first place. Certainly no Christian church ever christened you.”

The Disappearers is a bleak and uncompromising exploration of rage and survival; of trauma and its afterlife; of the terrible intimacy that binds victims to their perpetrators, and survivors to the dead, as well as revenge’s lure for those who are not given their due. Throughout, the narrative obsesses over the questions of whether meaning can emerge from the devastation of atrocity, and whether the void left by the missing is a mystery to be solved, or a limbo to be helplessly inhabited. What if the disappeared, done with being part of a world bent on eliminating them, didn’t want to be found? Fizzing with filth, snark and venom, the novel hawks and spits at convention, especially the politics of respectability that insists on restraint; it strafes down on homophobia with ruthless abandon. Few books have mapped the beleaguered realities of queer existence with such psychological depth, harrowing realism and searing condemnation.

The formal design, however, is not without flaws. The overlong narrative sags in places, tarrying where it should speed along, and the intertextuality – most obviously the revenge plot’s debt to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon – can veer into self-conscious pastiche. While the book’s conversation with the queer canon is richly rewarding (besides Herbert and Rechy, Gide, Genet, Vidal, Wilde, Baldwin and Holleran are some of the visiting spectres), I struggled with the fact that a significant chunk of the action is reported rather than dramatised. As well as the interview transcripts, we have letters from Havelock to a friend; some pivotal moments are thus experienced either at a temporal and affective remove, or inevitably somewhat summarised.

Ultimately, these are redeemable shortcomings in an otherwise remarkable novel. James makes room for the contradictions of queer life, its intimacies, estrangements and hungers, in utterly indelible ways. His prose is a consistent triumph: bitter and hilarious, lyrical, bawdy, pugnacious and scorchingly, ravishingly queer. The Booker judges have described this novel as a “reckoning”; it is incontestably also a haunting.

The Disappearers by Marlon James is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Question: why, if almost half of us now use cash only a few times a year, are high-denomination banknotes being printed in increasingly large numbers? In April 2024, the value of all the dollar bills in circulation reached an all-time high of $2.345tn, and may well be even more than that by now. The total value of dollars in the world has doubled every decade since the 1970s. Similarly, there are 1.552tn euro notes in circulation, while most other currencies – the British pound, the Japanese yen, the Swiss franc and so on – are all at something like their highest levels in history. This at a time when so many of us have pretty much stopped using cash altogether, and even the people who sell the Big Issue in our streets are equipped with card readers.

When I talk about “us”, I mean those who don’t have to worry about hiding huge cash profits from drug dealing, people-smuggling and so on. And that of course provides the answer to the question: while law-abiding citizens like you and I have to jump through hoops when we move even relatively small sums around for entirely legitimate reasons – buying a fridge or a secondhand car, say – drug dealers just shove bundles of the stuff into their coat pockets or suitcases and whisk them round the world in order to keep their business going. The number of dogs trained to sniff out cash at international airports is growing, but nothing like as fast as the rate at which big-denomination notes are being pumped out by the world’s central banks. And the ways in which money is laundered are growing in complexity and sophistication.

“Money laundering”, by the way, is an expression that started in 1920s Chicago, when Al Capone and his friends had to cope with this same problem: what to do with their vast bundles of greenbacks. They created or co-opted chains of laundries and other small shops to disguise the profits from bootlegging, then bought high-value items such as houses and entire companies (not to mention cops and politicians) with the cash that had been washed clean; “laundering” was a witty way of describing the process. Nowadays the number of men’s barber shops that have sprung up in Britain’s towns and cities may well hint at a new version of the process; though the salivating reporters from the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, hoping to link the Middle Eastern haircut with people-smuggling, drug dealing, immigration and the rise of “lawless” Britain, never quite managed to prove the case. That doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t one, of course.

Oliver Bullough is one of Britain’s finest investigative reporters. He is thorough, his sources are impressive, and he has a lovely, easy style which takes us through some of the darkest features of the world’s economy. He also has a fine sense of moral purpose, which puts his reporting on to a different level from the show-and-tell paperbacks that fill airport bookshop shelves. As his excellent books from the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse (plus his reporting for Reuters from Chechnya, the scariest war of modern times) showed, he seems to be completely without fear. In the nasty, complex business of reporting international money-laundering, courage is perhaps the most important quality.

Everybody Loves Our Dollars is a much-needed exposé. It starts off in the unlikeliest of settings: Bicester Village, the fashion outlet near Oxford which is built along the lines of a twee New England town; except that the shops bear the names of the world’s most famous fashion brands, from Jimmy Choo to Stella McCartney, Givenchy, Louis Vuitton and Gucci – and the prices are low, low, low. You get there by train from Marylebone in London, and the announcements en route show you who the target clientele is: “We are now approaching Bicester Village,” say recorded voices in Arabic and Mandarin Chinese. People get off with excited smiles, then others struggle on board carrying vast amounts of high-end shopping, often packed into one final purchase: an expensive suitcase that will take everything home to Bahrain or Chongqing.

Bullough maintains that this display of shopaholicism is a major form of money laundering in its own right. You can move large amounts of money around by buying expensive things. As a senior police officer tells him: “Factories in China ship drugs to British gangsters, who then give the payments in cash to Chinese students studying at UK universities. The students either take the cash to Bicester Village, or first pay it into their bank accounts before going; then they buy Gucci handbags or whatever, and ship them back to China.”

Bicester Village was perhaps the least exotic of the places Bullough visited for this book: others include the Marshall Islands, the Northern Marianas and Fort Worth, Texas, where the US Federal Reserve’s Western Currency Facility pumps out unthinkable amounts of $100 bills every day. Which of course leads us back to the question of why, when the demand for paper money is shrinking hugely in the west, are western central banks pumping out more? The answer is depressing. According to one estimate, 70% of all the $100 bills in existence circulate outside the US. The monetary value of each banknote, which only costs a few pence to print, is in effect loaned to the people who take them out of their banks or ATMs. The US Federal Reserve, Bullough writes, earns tens of billions of dollars from this arrangement. It’s an enormous profit, and the big central banks of the world simply aren’t prepared to relinquish it – no matter what the results.

And the results are, of course, appalling. In Mexico, which takes in something like $25bn in US banknotes per year, drug violence kills about 150 people every day. Since 2006, when the Mexican government started using the army to clamp down on the drug cartels, getting on for half a million people have been murdered. Among them was the husband of a woman I interviewed in Ciudad Juárez, a key drugs-trading city just across the border from El Paso. He had been an investigative journalist, like Bullough. After he revealed some of the local cartel’s secrets, he was murdered. The killers cut his head off and stuck it on the railings outside his front door; his young son found it when he came home from school.

This is just one minuscule part of the price the world pays for the profits of the central banks. We have long since lost the war against drugs. Now we’re losing the war against money laundering; the profits for our governments are just too big. The price is paid by people such as the widow of the Mexican investigative journalist in Ciudad Juárez. “I wiped the blood off his dead face and kissed his lips,” she told me. “I’ve never had a proper night’s sleep since that moment.” It’s a very heavy price to pay for a designer handbag.

A former Meta executive who wrote an explosive exposé making allegations about the social media company’s dealings with China and its treatment of teenagers is said to be “on the verge of bankruptcy” after publishing the book.

An MP has claimed in parliament that Mark Zuckerberg’s company was trying to “silence and punish” Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former director of global public policy at Meta’s precursor, Facebook, after her decision to speak out about her time at the company.

Louise Haigh, the former Labour transport secretary, said Wynn-Williams was facing a fine of $50,000 (£37,000) every time she breached an order secured by Meta preventing her from talking disparagingly about the company.

Wynn-Williams made a series of claims about the social media company’s behaviour and culture in her book Careless People, published this year. It also contained allegations of sexual harassment denied by the company. It states she was fired for “poor performance and toxic behaviour”.

However, the former diplomat was barred from publicising the memoir after Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, secured a ruling preventing her from doing so. She subsequently appeared before a US Senate judiciary subcommittee, in which she said Meta worked “hand in glove” with Beijing over censorship tools – something the company has denied.

Pan Macmillan, which published the memoir, said it had sold more than 150,000 copies across all formats. The book was also named in The Sunday Times‘ bestselling hardbacks of 2025 so far. The paperback edition is due to be published early next year.

New York magazine has previously reported that Wynn-Williams was paid an advance for the book of more than $500,000 (£370,000).

Haigh highlighted Wynn-Williams’s case in the House of Commons during a debate about employment rights on Monday. She said Wynn-Williams’s decision to speak out had plunged her into financial peril.

“Despite previous public statements that Meta no longer uses NDAs [non-disclosure agreements] in cases of sexual harassment – which Sarah has repeatedly alleged – she is being pushed to financial ruin through the arbitration system in the UK, as Meta seeks to silence and punish her for speaking out,” she said.

“Meta has served a gagging order on Sarah and is attempting to fine her $50,000 for every breach of that order. She is on the verge of bankruptcy. I am sure that the whole house and the government will stand with Sarah as we pass this legislation to ensure that whistleblowers and those with the moral courage to speak out are always protected.”

It is understood that the $50,000 figure represents the damages Wynn-Williams has to pay for material breaches of the separation agreement she signed when she left Meta in 2017. Meta has emphasised that Wynn-Williams entered into the non-disparagement agreement voluntarily as part of her departure.

Meta said that to date, Wynn-Williams had not been forced to make any payments under the agreement.

The company did not wish to comment on Haigh’s intervention. It has previously said that Wynn-Williams’s Senate testimony was “divorced from reality and riddled with false claims” about China and the company’s treatment of teenagers.

Meta has described the book as a “mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”. It has said she was fired for “poor performance and toxic behaviour” and that an investigation concluded she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment.

It said the ruling preventing her from publicising the memoir confirmed the “false and defamatory book should never have been published”.

The ruling stated Wynn-Williams should stop promoting the book and, to the extent she could, stop further publication. It did not order any action by Pan Macmillan.

Wynn-Williams has not spoken in public since appearing at the Senate hearing in April. In a written statement this month, she said she was grateful that the US Senate was continuing to investigate Meta’s behaviour.

“I wish I could say more,” she said. “I urge other tech employees and those who are thinking of whistleblowing to share what they know before more children are harmed.”

Her lawyer confirmed Wynn-Williams “remains silenced about the very matters Congress is investigating, despite clear and unanimous voices from Congress calling on Meta to end their arbitration proceedings which threaten to bankrupt her”.

An exposé by a former employee of Meta has become a bestseller despite the social media company banning the author from promoting the book.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy at Meta’s precursor, Facebook, topped the New York Times bestseller chart and will be fourth on the Sunday Times nonfiction hardback chart this weekend.

The book “sold a staggering 1,000 hardbacks a day in the first three days on sale in the UK, despite Meta’s legal tactics to silence the book’s author”, said Joanna Prior, CEO of publisher Pan Macmillan. “This early success is a triumph against Meta’s attempt to stop the publication of this book.”

The book is fourth on the overall Amazon US chart, and 13th on the Amazon UK chart.

Last Wednesday, Meta won an emergency arbitration ruling which placed a temporary hold on Wynn-Williams promoting the book. The American Arbitration Association’s emergency arbitrator, Nicholas Gowen, said that without emergency relief, Meta would suffer “immediate and irreparable loss”. Meta argued that the memoir is prohibited under a non-disparagement agreement signed by Wynn-Williams.

The book was announced just one week before publication, meaning there was only a week-long window for pre-orders, which are normally open for months and help boost a book’s chart position.

Wynn-Williams’ memoir is her account of seven years she spent at the company. She “had become part of what reads like a diabolical cult run by emotionally stunted men babies, institutionally enabled sexual harassers and hypocritical virtue-signalling narcissists”, writes Stuart Jeffries in an Observer review.

The memoir is an “ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world”, wrote Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times. Wynn-Williams “had a front-row seat to some of Facebook’s most ignominious episodes”.

Meta has described the book as “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about [its] executives”.

The emergency ruling dictated that Wynn-Williams must stop promoting the book, refrain from “amplifying any further disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments”, and retract previous disparaging comments “to the extent within her control”.

It did not order any action by the publisher. “As publishers, we are committed to upholding freedom of speech and her right to tell her story,” said a spokesperson for Pan Macmillan.