The Illegal: A Novel - Hardcover

Hill, Lawrence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039307059X ISBN 13: 9780393070590

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016

Synopsis

Finalist for the 2017 NAACP Image Award

Internationally best-selling author Lawrence Hill returns with an extraordinary, resonant novel about a man on the run.

Lawrence Hill spellbound readers with Someone Knows My Name (made into the television mini-series, The Book of Negroes), hailed as “transporting” (Entertainment Weekly) and “completely engrossing” (Washington Post). The Illegal is the gripping story of Keita Ali, a refugee―like the many in today’s headlines―compelled to leave his homeland.

All Keita has ever wanted to do is to run. Running means respect and wealth at home. His native Zantoroland, a fictionalized country whose tyrants are eerily familiar, turns out the fastest marathoners on earth. But after his journalist father is killed for his outspoken political views, Keita must flee to the wealthy nation of Freedom State―a country engaged in a crackdown on all undocumented people.

There, Keita becomes a part of the new underground. He learns what it means to live as an illegal: surfacing to earn cash prizes by running local races and assessing whether the people he meets will be kind or turn him in. As the authorities seek to arrest Keita, he strives to elude capture and ransom his sister, who has been kidnapped.

Set in an imagined country bearing a striking resemblance to our own, this tension-filled novel casts its eye on race, human potential, and what it means to belong.

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: 2016
• ISBN 10: 039307059X
• ISBN 13: 9780393070590
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400