The Moor's Account: A Novel
Laila Lalami“Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores & Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, & much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth.” - Salman Rushdie
In 1527, the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez sailed from the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda with a crew of six hundred men & 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 & 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; & 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 illuminates the ways in which stories can transmigrate into history, & how storytelling can offer a chance for redemption, reinvention & survival.
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Laila Lalami was born & raised in Morocco. She is the author of the short story collection Hope & Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, & the novel Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist. www.lailalalami.com