The Illegal: A Novel - Softcover

Hill, Lawrence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393353680 ISBN 13: 9780393353686

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017

Synopsis

“A gripping political thriller readers may find hard to put down.”―Dallas Morning News

Keita Ali is an elite runner living in Zantoroland, a poor, fictional island that is erupting in political violence. When his father, a journalist, is murdered, Keita escapes to the wealthy nation of Freedom State―an imagined country much like our own. A stateless refugee without documentation, Keita must hide from the authorities even as he races marathons to support himself and ransom his sister who has been kidnapped. This tension-filled novel by the best-selling author of Someone Knows My Name is an astute exploration of dislocation, starting all over again, and the desperate need for home and community.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

The #1 National Bestselling novel about family, identity and belonging

Winner of CBC’s Canada Reads

A CBC, Globe and Mail and National Post Best Book of the Year

Keita Ali is on the run. Like every boy on the impoverished island of Zantoroland, running is all Keita’s ever wanted to do. Running means respect and riches—until Keita is targeted for his father’s outspoken political views and discovers he must run for his survival.

He signs on with a notorious marathon agent, but when things turn sour Keita flees to Freedom State—a wealthy nation bent on deporting the tens of thousands of refugees living within its borders. Deportation would mean death, so Keita trains in secret, eluding capture, surfacing only occasionally to earn money in road races. And soon he is running not only for his own life, but for his sister’s life too.

Fast moving, suspenseful and compelling, The Illegal captures in Keita’s story one of the most pressing issues of our time. It casts a satirical eye on people who have turned their backs on undocumented refugees struggling to survive in a nation that does not want them. Hill’s depiction of life on the borderlands of society reveals the endurance of the human spirit and urges us to consider the plight of the unseen and the forgotten who live among us.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0393353680
• ISBN 13: 9780393353686
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416