Moor's Account (Lalami)

Book Reviews
Feels at once historical and contemporary.... For Lalami, storytelling is a primal struggle over power between the strong and the weak, between good and evil, and against forgetting.... Lalami sees the story [of Estebanico] as a form of moral and spiritual instruction that can lead to transcendence.
New York Times Book Review


Estebanico is a superb storyteller, capable of sensitive character appraisals and penetrating ethnographic detail.
Wall Street Journal


[A] rich novel based on an actual, ill-fated 16th century Spanish expedition to Florida.... Offers a pungent alternative history that muses on the ambiguous power of words to either tell the truth or reshape it according to our desires.
Los Angeles Times


Compelling.... Necessary.... Laila Lalami’s mesmerizing The Moor’s Account presents us a historical fiction that feels something like a plural totality....a narrative that braids points of view so intricately that they become one even as we’re constantly reminded of the separate and often contrary strands that render the whole.
Los Angeles Review of Books


A bold and exhilarating bid to give a real-life figure muzzled by history the chance to have his say in fiction.
San Francisco Chronicle


Meticulously researched and inventive.... Those interested in the history of the Spanish colonization of the Americas will find much to like in The Moor’s Account, as will lovers of good yarns of faraway lands and times.
Seattle Times


Excellent historical fiction.... The way the Moor’s account differs from the Spaniards is amazing. It’s a play on perspective in more ways than one.
Ebony


An exciting tale of wild hopes, divided loyalties, and highly precarious fortunes.
New Yorker


Stunning.... The Moor’s Account sheds light on all of the possible the New World exploration stories that didn’t make history.
Huffington Post
 

Lalami's second novel is historical fiction of the first-order, a gripping tale of Spanish exploration in the New World set in the years 1527 to 1536, as told by a Muslim slave. Meticulously researched.... [t]his is a colorful but grim tale of Spanish exploration and conquest, marked by brutality, violence, and indifference to the suffering of native peoples.
Publishers Weekly


Assured, lyrical imagining of the life of one of the first African slaves in the New World—a native, like Lalami, of Morocco and, like her, a gifted storyteller.... Adding a new spin to a familiar story, Lalami offers an utterly believable, entertainingly told alternative to the historical record. A delight.
Kirkus Reviews