In this stunning work of historical fiction, Laila Lalami brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America, a Moroccan slave, whose testimony was left out of the official record. In 1527, the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez sailed from the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda with a crew of 600 men and nearly 100 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 and 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, Cabeza de Vaca; a Spanish nobleman named Alonso del Castillo; a young explorer named Andrés Dorantes; and 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, conquistador to humble servants, from fearful outcast to faith healers.