The Illegal: A Novel
Books / Hardcover
ISBN: 039307059X / Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, January 2016
Finalist for the 2017 NAACP Image AwardInternationally best-selling author Lawrence Hill returns with an extraordinary, resonant novel about a man on the run.
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Someone Knows My NameThe Book of NegroesEntertainment WeeklyWashington PostThe IllegalAll 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.
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