Ingenious piece of historical fiction, though I'm taking liberties with the word 'historical'. Recreation of the life of a slave who accompanied a doomed Spanish expedition from Florida through Texas and Mexico, across rivers and plains whose names would all be usurped by Spanish ones. It's a picaresque, retold from margins and with the tint of a new perspective. The slave Estebanico, who gets only one line confirming his existence in the Spanish testimony, tells the story of his life in Morocco, then selling himself into slavery, and finding peace in a once-strange land far from what once was home.