4.5★In 1527 ships with six hundred men sailed from Castile across the Ocean of Fog and Darkness with the goal to claim the land and riches of present day Florida and the gulf coast areas of the United States. They were searching for a kingdom of gold but encountered instead, hurricanes, shipwreck, starvation, disease, alligators, murder, cannibalism, and mutiny, while decisively squandering any opportunity to endear indigenous tribes to their cause. Only four would make it out alive. Their con...

the sweetest, most lovely thing of this book is the voice of mustafa/estebanico, the narrator, who goes through hell and back but never loses faith, compassion and grace. he's the magnificent moral center of this novel, what makes reading it, in spite of its horrors, tolerable and moving. all books about horror need the tenderness of a voice like estebanico's. we cannot endure horror without a virgil walking us through it. estabenanico has the gentleness and moral gravitas of virgil. and you may...

Fascinating historical fiction detailing one of the first encounters of Spain with the New World and told through the eyes of a slave. Heartbreaking yet hopefully. Beautiful yet brutal. Highly recommend this.

I was looking forward to reading this book when I first heard that Laila Lalami would write a fictionalized account of Estebanico as I knew she would provide the necessary insight on Morocco and a Moroccan point-of-view of the 1500s. This book exceeded my expectations. There are many accounts of the Narvaez expedition and what happened in the years 1527 – 1536, when the four survivors (out of 600) were reunited with other Spaniards. Among the survivors was a Moroccan slave known in the accounts

[4+ stars] A riveting, action-packed tale based on the Narváez expedition from Spain to the Americas in the early 1500s. The storyteller is "The Moor" who gives his account of their adventures and his life before slavery.I read in Lalami's acknowledgments that the novel was inspired by one line in Cabeza de Vaca's chronicles of the expedition: "The fourth [survivor] is Estevancico, an Arab Negro from Azamor." Very well done.

1 slave...a black Arab Moor, 'Mustafa/Estebanico', and three Castilians are the onlysurvivors from the Narvaez's Expedition from Spain to the gulf of Florida. The story shifts from an expedition of the territory - to- self-exploring-- (men facing their humanity). This is such a fantastic book which allows you to feel as if you are one of the survivors. There is less focus on searching for gold and conquering land after almost 600 people have died. With only 4 surviving men, they were forced to r...

Oh dear, I seem stuck in the doldrums a bit - not really passionately engaging with any books recently (except maybe A Little Life, and I'm still not sure whether that engagement was healthy).Lalami has great raw material for her historical fiction about Estebanico, the first African to explore the Americas (or at least the first so recorded!). Or perhaps I should say she has a great seed - because apparently almost nothing is known about the historical Estebanico, other than that he was a Berbe...

“It was slowly dawning upon all of us that Apalache had no gold and there would be no glory. My fantasies of victory for my master and freedom for me had turned so completely awry that, for a moment, all my senses felt numb. I was rooted in my spot, unable to move, and my eyesight blurred. I thought about that night, long ago in Azemmur, when I had agreed to sell my life for a bit of gold. My father and my mother had both warned me about the danger of putting a price on everything, but I had not...

Phenomenal - well written, insightful, thoroughly researched. The audio reader was stupendous as well - aside from a few misprounounced words, he did an amazing job portraying the numerous characters.

To his Spanish masters he was always known as Estebanico, a diminutive form of the name Esteban. Yet his name was Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori and he is the one telling this tale of attempted conquest and enrichment gone wrong."I had put my life in the hands of others and now here I was, at the edge of the known world, lost and afraid. All along, I had told myself that I did not have a choice, that I had been the one to put myself into bondage and I had to accept this fate. Some...

Reading this book gave me a different perspective on the colonization of Mexico and the Spanish influence in Florida. I have enrolled in courses that focused on Cortes, his experiences in Mexico, and the Aztecs. I've also read Aztec by Gary Jennings, although that was many years ago. I've always been fascinated with this part of history and The Moor's Account offered me a new version of the account of colonialism in Mexico and parts of the U.S. The Moorish/African influence has obviously been ov...

Very interesting and well done historical fiction account of the Spanish Narváez expedition of 1527 that was sent to colonize Florida. Upon sailing into the Tampa area, Narváez (the commander of the armada) split his contingent in two, with half staying in the gulf with the ships and the other half heading north on foot to look for a rich kingdom called Apalache, which supposedly had great quantities of gold and other precious metals. 300 officers, soldiers, friars and settlers set off, only to

In 1527, conquistador Narváez sails from Spain for Florida with an armada of 600 men. His objective is to capture that region for the Spanish crown and become rich and famous like Hernán Cortés. After landing, they decide to divide into two groups: one to sail along the coast to a port, and the other to march northwards onto native Indian lands. The inland unit encounters many hardships. They have to endure swamps, disease, starvation, and skirmishes with hostile Indians. With dwindling numbers

In Cabeza de Vaca’s account of his epic adventures as part of the ill-fated Narváez Expedition, the Spanish explorer devotes only a single line to Estevanico, one of the four survivors, along with de Vaca: El cuarto se llama Estevanico, es negro alárabe, natural de Azamor. Roughly translated, it reads: “The fourth [survivor] is Estevanico, an Arab Negro from Azamor.” According to Laila Lalami, this is all we know about Estebanico (as she spells it); just a handful of unadorned words. That is...

My next read is well underway, but I am still thinking about this brilliant novel, which I finished a week ago. I got so much more than I planned for. I read a library copy and am planning to buy a copy for my bookshelf. I hope to find time to pull together a review for this one within the next week or so...

Well that was very different than what I expected. I was thinking it would be more biblical...as in the wise men and Israel/Africa etc. Hmmm probably should have read the summary: "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. [sic] Within a year there were only four survivors..." In retrospect, it's good that I didn't read the summary or else I might not have picked it up. Historical fict...

The Moor's Account is a historical fiction novel about Pánfilo de Narváez's expedition into the land that would eventually be called Florida.This tale is told from the point of view of a slave named Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico by the Spanish man who owned him."This book is the humble work of Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, being a true account of his life and travels from the city of Azemmur to the Land of the Indians, where he arrived as a slave and, in his attempt to re...

I worried that I had made a huge mistake with this audiobook in its first few minutes.See, right off the bat, Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori’s verbose introduction to his account sets the stage for a historical fiction novel with really pretty prose. The rub: I’m relatively new to the audiobook scene, but the more interesting the writing, the more likely I am to want to read it rather than listen to it. Audiobooks can have a tendency to slip into the background over long periods o...

Mustafa ibn Muhammad is about to discover how fragile are the threads that tie together the fabric of our lives. The year is 1527, and this once wealthy Moroccan trader has sold himself to a Spanish captain in order that his family may eat. There's a certain irony about this, as Mustafa had been involved in the slave trade himself before his life collapsed around him. That same year the conquistador Panfilo de Narvaez, together with 600 crew, sailed for what is now known as the Gulf Coast in the...

The Moor's Account nearly beat the lacklustre All the Light We Cannot See in 2015 and it must have been a mediocre year because I was not blown away by Laila Lalami's historical fiction account of the ill-fated Navaez expedition. I thought the narrator was always a bit too naïve, too good, too perfect. The Castilians were reprehensible as one would expect all the way to the end. I don't know, I mean, the idea was original, the format interesting, but I guess I have been spoiled by the writing of...