The Moor's account (2014)

The disastrous Narváez expedition of 1527 becomes the imagined testimony of Mustafa, the enslaved Moroccan known in surviving records as Estebanico. His storytelling challenges the Spanish account of discovery and survival along the Gulf Coast. A gripping starting point for sixteenth-century encounter and the power to leave a record. Lalami's reconstructed voice is fiction filling an archival silence, rather than a recovered autobiography.