Download Ebook Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, by Lawrence Hill
Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill. A task could obligate you to consistently enhance the expertise and also experience. When you have no adequate time to enhance it directly, you can obtain the experience and also expertise from reviewing the book. As everyone knows, book Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill is incredibly popular as the window to open up the world. It means that checking out publication Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill will offer you a new way to find every little thing that you require. As guide that we will certainly provide here, Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill
Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, by Lawrence Hill
Download Ebook Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, by Lawrence Hill
Just how a suggestion can be got? By looking at the superstars? By going to the sea and taking a look at the sea interweaves? Or by checking out a book Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill Everyone will certainly have particular particular to obtain the inspiration. For you who are dying of publications and constantly get the motivations from books, it is actually excellent to be below. We will reveal you hundreds collections of guide Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill to check out. If you like this Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill, you could likewise take it as your own.
Presents currently this Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill as one of your book collection! But, it is not in your bookcase compilations. Why? This is the book Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill that is given in soft data. You can download the soft file of this stunning book Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill now as well as in the web link offered. Yeah, different with the other individuals that search for book Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill outside, you could get less complicated to posture this book. When some individuals still stroll right into the establishment as well as look the book Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill, you are below just remain on your seat as well as obtain guide Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill.
While the other people in the store, they are not sure to locate this Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill directly. It could need more times to go establishment by store. This is why we suppose you this site. We will supply the very best method and also reference to get the book Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill Even this is soft file book, it will be convenience to bring Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill any place or save at home. The distinction is that you may not require move guide Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill location to place. You might require only duplicate to the various other gadgets.
Now, reading this amazing Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill will certainly be less complicated unless you obtain download the soft file right here. Simply right here! By clicking the connect to download Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill, you can start to obtain guide for your very own. Be the initial owner of this soft file book Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill Make distinction for the others as well as get the very first to progression for Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, By Lawrence Hill Present moment!
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. "Wonderfully written...populated by vivid characters and rendered in fascinating detail."―Nancy Kline, New York Times Book Review
Kidnapped from Africa as a child, Aminata Diallo is enslaved in South Carolina but escapes during the chaos of the Revolutionary War. In Manhattan she becomes a scribe for the British, recording the names of blacks who have served the King and earned their freedom in Nova Scotia. But the hardship and prejudice of the new colony prompt her to follow her heart back to Africa, then on to London, where she bears witness to the injustices of slavery and its toll on her life and a whole people. It is a story that no listener, and no reader, will ever forget. Reading group guide included.- Sales Rank: #42806 in Books
- Brand: Hill, Lawrence
- Published on: 2008-11-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x 1.40" w x 5.60" l, .89 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 486 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Stunning, wrenching and inspiring, the fourth novel by Canadian novelist Hill (Any Known Blood) spans the life of Aminata Diallo, born in Bayo, West Africa, in 1745. The novel opens in 1802, as Aminata is wooed in London to the cause of British abolitionists, and begins reflecting on her life. Kidnapped at the age of 11 by British slavers, Aminata survives the Middle Passage and is reunited in South Carolina with Chekura, a boy from a village near hers. Her story gets entwined with his, and with those of her owners: nasty indigo producer Robinson Appleby and, later, Jewish duty inspector Solomon Lindo. During her long life of struggle, she does what she can to free herself and others from slavery, including learning to read and teaching others to, and befriending anyone who can help her, black or white. Hill handles the pacing and tension masterfully, particularly during the beginnings of the American revolution, when the British promise to free Blacks who fight for the British: Aminata's related, eventful travels to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone follow. In depicting a woman who survives history's most trying conditions through force of intelligence and personality, Hill's book is a harrowing, breathtaking tour de force. (Nov.)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“A masterpiece, daring and impressive in its geographic, historical and human reach.” (Globe and Mail)
“With grace and compassion, Hill populates true and harrowing experience with an authentic hero―just as good historical fiction requires.” (Jennifer Berman - Bookforum)
“Astonishing in scope, humanity and beauty, this is one of those very rare novels in which the deep joy of reading transcends its time and place. Like ?To Kill a Mockingbird?, ?Someone Knows My Name? lets readers experience a life, one footstep at a time, beside an unforgettable protagonist.” (Eileen Charbonneau - Historical Novels Review)
“Stunning, wrenching and inspiring.... Hill handles the pacing and tension masterfully... [his] book is a harrowing, breathing tour de force.” (Publishers Weekly)
About the Author
Lawrence Hill is the author of several novels including Someone Knows My Name, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was nominated in the United States for the Huston Wright Legacy Award. In 2015 Hill was appointed to the Order of Canada “for his contributions as an author and activist who tells the stories of Canada’s black community and of women and girls in Africa.” A graduate of the Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he lives in Ontario, Canada.
Most helpful customer reviews
147 of 153 people found the following review helpful.
Outstanding Historical Fiction!!!
By Mocha Girl
The actual Book of Negroes is an amazing historical document (a British military ledger) that contains the names and descriptions of 3,000 men, women, and children who served or were supported by the British during the American Revolutionary War. Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes is a brilliantly imagined novel based on the document of the same name and the events surrounding the relocation of thousands of Black Loyalists to various British colonies and eventually to Sierra Leone after the conflict. Similar in approach to The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Hill's offering spans the lifetime of the fictional Aminata (Meena) Diallo, an African born woman who escaped to freedom.
At the beginning of the novel Meena is in London, an old woman who has lived a tumultuous life. At the urging of her abolitionist sponsors, she is asked to pen her story which would be used as evidence depicting the cruelty and inhumanity of the slave trade. Meena, an intelligent, educated woman, authors her autobiography via vivid flashbacks through time. She writes, "Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary." She continues and details her life as a young child in an African village, her capture and Middle Passage crossing, enslavement while in America, relocation to Nova Scotia, return to Africa (Freetown, Sierra Leone), and partnering with abolitionists in England.
However to summarize the book in such a way is a huge understatement - it is steeped in historical facts that educate and enlighten the reader; I was pulled in immediately after reading the opening passages. Before her capture, African spirituality/religion, education (Meena's father taught her to read and write, her mother taught her midwifery), family structure, and culture are illustrated in her interactions with her parents and other villagers. After witnessing her parent's murder at the hands of African slavers, she is coffled and mournfully treks through the African interior for months before arriving exhausted at the coastal slave port. Meena transcribed the inhumanity of the trade, the stifling stench and horrid conditions aboard the slave ship, the rapes and attempted revolts that occurred during the crossing, and the shameful and dehumanizing experience on the auction block. She suffers hardships in America at an indigo producing plantation in South Carolina. She experiences the love and loss of a husband and children. Unwilling to work after the abrupt sale of her son, she is eventually sold to a new owner and escapes to freedom while in New York. Once there, she is employed by the British to record entrants into the infamous "book" and relocates to Nova Scotia. After a decade of struggling against the harsh elements, barren landscape and broken promises regarding land ownership; she and 1,200 other Africans relocate yet again to Africa to establish Freetown in partnership with London-based abolitionists.
The author notes in the Afterword where he has taken a few liberties with the timeline and some historical figures; however the vast majority of the book is factual; extracted from history books and inspired by diaries, memoirs, notes, etc. Hill expertly layers the social and political climates of the time against the protagonist's story. This novel is extremely well-written, perfectly paced, and highly recommended as a study aid for students or to anyone who enjoys the historical fiction genre.
Reviewed by Phyllis
APOOO BookClub
Nubian Circle Book Club
52 of 53 people found the following review helpful.
"We will cry out always always always just so you don't forget us."
By Luan Gaines
Thanks to the storytelling skills of one who has the vision to imagine one female's journey through decades of slavery, revolution and abolitionist fervor, once more the silent rise from the depths to howl their grief, rage and spirit. Born a free Muslim in her village, Aminata Diallo leaves childhood behind, as well as the dead bodies of her father and mother, captured by slave-traders, chained to others on a months' long trek to the ship that will carry this valuable cargo across the ocean to the American colonies. Bereft, Aminata stands horrified as dead slaves are tossed overboard or leap from despair into the waiting sea.
Taught by her mother to "catch babies", the girl delivers two infants during the course of the voyage, but death strikes once again on a shipboard uprising, white men and Africans butchered in a melee of impromptu weapons and deadly "firesticks". The sights and smells of this ordeal remain imprinted on Aminata's soul, the past severed as she is thrust into a new, forbidding world. At an indigo plantation in South Carolina, Aminata learns more harsh lessons of slavery, the humiliation of belonging to someone far more powerful and unpredictable, introduced to cruelty, degradation, love and motherhood, stripped finally of all she holds dear. Brilliant and curious, "Meena" learns to hide her accomplishments behind the fa�ade of obedience. Even in her darkest moments of despair, Meena holds fast to the truth- she was born free and belongs to no one.
In such a story, the telling of truth is burdened with outrage: man's inhumane treatment of those they would exploit, the onus of slavery through centuries, the capacity for evil in the pursuit of profit. In Meena, we witness the toll on one human life. Somehow this courageous woman endures, making her way from Africa to South Carolina, New York, Nova Scotia, back to Africa and London. She catches babies from one continent to another, learning the falsity of promises and the impossibility of another voice to tell ones story: "Beware the clever man who makes wrong look right." Educated, well-spoken and determined, Aminata gathers languages to tell her tale to all who may listen, to Africans and abolitionists alike, of the Diaspora from her homeland to many countries, everywhere speaking her truth.
What Barry Unsworth did for the Middle Passage in Sacred Hunger, Lawrence Hill does for the suffering of slaves, shackled first to one another, then to their owners, even abolition serving the interests of trade before humanity. Aminata Diallo's story is personal, yet speaks for many, the devastating journey of a young girl from a stolen childhood to old age, her spirit undaunted in spite of those who would own or use her. To be reminded of this nightmare is to be reminded of the collective inhumanity of those who rationalize deeds to serve the god of profit; more importantly, Aminata celebrates the extraordinary courage of the human spirit in the face of evil. Luan Gaines/ 2007.
46 of 49 people found the following review helpful.
Calling out my name
By Friederike Knabe
Hearing your own name spoken in public isn't usually something significant. Yet, on a slave trading ship that transported up to a thousand Africans to North America, this act of public acknowledgement was momentous. Calling out their full names to each other was equal to "affirming their humanity". In the early mornings from the bowels of the vessel the chanting voices represented not only an important ritual of recognition and respect, it was also a way of finding out who had made it through the night. The conditions on the slave ship were abysmal: the Africans were jammed together and shackled most of the time, lacking food and water and sanitation, leading to exhaustion, infections and starvation. Many lost their minds, many more died. When the captives arrived in North America they were traded and sold like cattle and their suffering continued.
The brutality of the West African slave trade in which millions of Africans perished is well documented. However, when a knowledgeable and perceptive novelist transforms these records and the many personal accounts of cruelty and tragedy on the one hand and survival, perseverance and hope on the other into one inclusive narrative around one memorable character, the realities of the many merge into one rich and lively, heart wrenching and joyful history-based novel of exceptional beauty and power.
First we meet Aminata Diallo, the heroine of The Book of Negroes, as a frail old woman, yet with a fiery spirit and resolve that she must have had all her life. Hill's novel lets her relate her story in her own voice, direct and uncomplicated, yet subtle and insightful. Written in the best African story-telling tradition, it addresses readers directly, absorbing us completely into characters, times and places of the struggle for survival and eventual freedom.
Nurtured by loving parents in rural Mali, Aminata, unusual for the time, was educated in reading and the Qur'an by her father and learned the skill of "catching babies" from her midwife mother. Hill's familiarity with places and cultures of different peoples in West Africa gives the depiction of village life and tradition vivacity and veracity. At age eleven, during a raid on the village, the young girl is seized by African slavers and forced to join many others on the long, hard road into slavery. The memory of her parents, killed during the attack, gives her strength and guidance throughout her ordeal. Her beauty and intelligence combined with her midwifery skills, help her to stay alive during the dangerous passage to North America and for the next decades, sold as property to different more or less abuse owners.
Aminata's portrayal of survival in the midst of so many who perish, of violence and misery, but also of friendships found and lost, as well as love and family, evokes a rainbow of emotions in the reader - from despair and sadness to delight and joy. Hill's talent placing himself into the mind of his heroine is admirable. Through her he has created a captivating panoramic life story with authentic characters. Not only is the heroine of the novel a wonderfully vibrant and endearing personality, she is surrounded by many, equally believable, individuals.
Aminata's life voyage takes her through many dramatic turns of fate to freedom and back into Africa. During the American War for Independence, she finds herself on the British side and is sent, as a freed slave, to Nova Scotia with the promise for a better life. She enters her name in the historic "Book of Negroes", a British military ledger that recorded the names and details of some 3,000 black Loyalists being allowed to leave the American territory for Shelburne Harbour. Hope, however, turns into gloom and despair. The first race riots in North America break out in Shelburne. Birchtown, the black settlement, is ransacked and many inhabitants are killed. Betrayed by some, but supported by others, Aminata survives and finally fulfils her dream of returning "home" as one of the "adventurers" of the Sierra Leone resettlement program, sponsored by British abolitionists. She has come full circle but not quite in the way she had dreamt. Asked by abolitionist politicians in London to tell her story as a genuine African voice to promote their cause, Aminata takes on a final new role.
Hill's novel brings many factual historical strands together, introducing a range of contemporary personalities accurately into the storyline. Together he transforms them into a stunning and wide reaching panorama of human suffering, endurance and victory. Rich in authentic detail yet fluid in its style and tone, He has brought memorable characters to life that illustrate the strengths of the human spirit. [Friederike Knabe]
Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, by Lawrence Hill PDF
Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, by Lawrence Hill EPub
Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, by Lawrence Hill Doc
Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, by Lawrence Hill iBooks
Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, by Lawrence Hill rtf
Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, by Lawrence Hill Mobipocket
Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, by Lawrence Hill Kindle
