The Moors Account

**PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST**
**NOMINATED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE**
**WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD**

A New York Times Notable Book
A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of the Year
An NPR Great Read of 2014
A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of the Year

In these pages, Laila Lalami brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America: Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico. The slave of a Spanish conquistador, Estebanico sails for the Americas with his master, Dorantes, as part of a danger-laden expedition to Florida. Within a year, Estebanico is one of only four crew members to survive.

As he journeys across America with his Spanish companions, the Old World roles of slave and master fall away, and Estebanico remakes himself as an equal, a healer, and a remarkable storyteller. His tale illuminates the ways in which our narratives can transmigrate into history — and how storytelling can offer a chance at redemption and survival.

“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.” The New York Times Book Review

“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.” The Seattle 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.” The Los Angeles Review of Books

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

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

Laila Lalami is the author of the short story collection Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, and the novel Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize long list. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, and The New York Times, and in many anthologies. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lannan Residency Fellowship and is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.

Before we can tell, we must remember. The first people to call this part of the Mojave home were the Cahuilla, the Serrano, the Chemehuevi. For hundreds of years, they built shelters of brush or thatch, cleared trails, foraged for nuts and acorns, hunted deer, rabbit, and mountain sheep. They traded fur in the spring and turquoise in the summer...

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