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In 1527, the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez sailed from the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda with a crew of six hundred men and nearly a hundred horses. His goal was to claim what is now the Gulf Coast of the United States for the Spanish crown and, in the process, become as wealthy and famous as Hernán Cortés.
But from the moment the Narváez expedition landed in Florida, it faced peril - navigational errors, disease, starvation, as well as resistance from indigenous tribes. Within a year there were only four survivors: the expedition's treasurer, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca; a Spanish nobleman named Alonso del Castillo Maldonado; a young explorer named Andrés Dorantes de Carranza; and Dorantes's Moroccan slave, Mustafa al-Zamori, whom the three Spaniards called Estebanico. These four survivors would go on to make a journey across America that would transform them from proud conquistadores to humble servants, from fearful outcasts to faith healers.
The Moor's Account brilliantly captures Estebanico's voice and vision, giving us an alternate narrative for this famed expedition. As the dramatic chronicle unfolds, we come to understand that, contrary to popular belief, black men played a significant part in New World exploration and Native American men and women were not merely silent witnesses to it. In Laila Lalami's deft hands, Estebanico's memoir illuminates the ways in which stories can transmigrate into history, even as storytelling can offer a chance for redemption and survival.
"[A] marvelous piece of old-fashioned storytelling rife with contemporary themes, from greed and plunder to cross-cultural understanding and assimilation." - Library Journal
"A deeply layered, complex portrait of all-too-familiar characters in an unfamiliar world... A totally engrossing and captivating novel that reconsiders the overlooked roles of Africans in New World exploration." - Booklist
"Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth." - Salman Rushdie
"A beautiful, rousing tale that would be difficult to believe if it were not actually true. Lalami has once again shown why she is one of her generation's most gifted writers." - Reza Aslan, author of Zealot
"Tremendous and powerful, The Moor's Account is one of the finest historical novels I've encountered in a while. It rings with thunder!" - Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Little Failure
This information about The Moor's Account was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: © Beowulf Sheehan
Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor's Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; was on the longlist for the Booker Prize; and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Lalami's writing appears regularly in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper's, The Guardian, and The New York Times. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles....
... Full Biography
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Link to Laila Lalami's Website
Name Pronunciation
Laila Lalami: LAY-luh LAH-luh-mee
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