The remarkable thing about Lawrence Hill's fourth novel, Someone Knows My Name, the life story of an African Muslim girl sold into slavery, isn't her physical survival. Sure, that's wrenchingly rendered and gives the story its heart. But it's the girl's emotional survival, her constant and ferocious fight for humanity that gives the book its considerable soul.

Aminata Diallo is 11 years old when a group of black men step out from the trees near her village in West Africa and kidnap her. Her parents fight to the death for their daughter, but in vain. The child is leashed by the neck to a group of captives and force-marched, naked, for three months across the continent. There, British slave ships ride at anchor on the Sierra Leone coast, waiting to ferry their human cargo to the Thirteen Colonies.

It's 1745, and the transatlantic slave trade is in full, unapologetic swing; Hill doesn't flinch from the details of his heroine's ordeal: Aminata is beaten, branded, and starved. She's ogled and inspected by white men. She's betrayed by her fellow Africans, villagers who collude with the slavers. As staggering as the details of her degradation, though, are the observations of her facile mind.

But our captors were also marked by what they lacked: light in their eyes. Never have I met a person doing terrible things who would meet my own eyes peacefully. To gaze into another person's face is to do two things: to recognize their humanity and to assert your own.

Aminata's humanity is never in question. A grueling voyage brings her, more dead than alive, to South Carolina. There, she's sold to Robinson Appleby, an indigo producer. On Appleby's plantation, Aminata learns the realities of slave life, of her powerless place in a world ruled by whites, and of a lifesaving refuge in the secret, underground culture created by her fellow slaves.

Here, soon after her