| Vendor | |
|---|---|
|
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik |
| Original language | |
| English | |
Based on the True Story of Yasuke
Set in late sixteenth-century Africa, India, Portugal, and Japan, THE AFRICAN SAMURAI is a powerful historical novel based on the true life story of Yasuke, Japan's first foreign-born samurai and the only samurai to be of African descent.
In 1579, a Portuguese trade ship sails into port at Kinchotsu, Japan, loaded with European wares and weapons. Also aboard is an enormous East African slave. Taken from his village as a boy, sold as a slave to mercenaries and forced to fight in Indian wars that meant nothing to him, he is a young but experienced soldier.
Serving as the protector for a high-ranking Italian priest, the young African soldier joins an expedition pushing inland towards the capital city of Kyoto.
In central Japan, they meet Oda Nobunaga, the land's most powerful warlord who is preparing a campaign to complete the unification of a nation that's been torn apart by over a hundred years of civil war. Under the tutelage of Nobunaga, the young African soldier becomes the great warrior Yasuke, who against all odds becomes Japan's first foreign samurai, and the only one of African descent. His preoccupation is not a question of power, as it is for Nobunaga, but one of freedom.
THE AFRICAN SAMURAI is a timeless, epic story; a magnificent reconstruction and moving study of a lost historical figure; and a truly enthralling narrative, thrilling in its dramatization of East versus West and the making of the modern Japan, from which rises the most unlikely of heroes.
CRAIG SHREVE was born and raised in North Buxton, Ontario (the final destination for slaves escaping the United States via the Underground Railroad), and is a descendant of Abraham Doras Shadd, the first Black person in Canada to be elected to public office, and of his daughter Mary Ann Shadd, the pioneering abolitionist, suffragette, and newspaper editor/publisher. Craig is the author of One Night in Mississippi (2015, Thomas Allen Publishers). He is a graduate of The School for Writers at Humber College and was a semi-finalist in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award in 2010.
Serving as the protector for a high-ranking Italian priest, the young African soldier joins an expedition pushing inland towards the capital city of Kyoto.
In central Japan, they meet Oda Nobunaga, the land's most powerful warlord who is preparing a campaign to complete the unification of a nation that's been torn apart by over a hundred years of civil war. Under the tutelage of Nobunaga, the young African soldier becomes the great warrior Yasuke, who against all odds becomes Japan's first foreign samurai, and the only one of African descent. His preoccupation is not a question of power, as it is for Nobunaga, but one of freedom.
THE AFRICAN SAMURAI is a timeless, epic story; a magnificent reconstruction and moving study of a lost historical figure; and a truly enthralling narrative, thrilling in its dramatization of East versus West and the making of the modern Japan, from which rises the most unlikely of heroes.
CRAIG SHREVE was born and raised in North Buxton, Ontario (the final destination for slaves escaping the United States via the Underground Railroad), and is a descendant of Abraham Doras Shadd, the first Black person in Canada to be elected to public office, and of his daughter Mary Ann Shadd, the pioneering abolitionist, suffragette, and newspaper editor/publisher. Craig is the author of One Night in Mississippi (2015, Thomas Allen Publishers). He is a graduate of The School for Writers at Humber College and was a semi-finalist in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award in 2010.
| Available products |
|---|
|
Book
Published by Simon & Schuster Canada |