Someone Knows My Name

Lawrence Hill

Dec 2007 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Adenrele Ojo

About this audiobook

Aminata Diallo (“an amazing literary creation,” Literary Review of Canada) is the beguil­ing heroine of Lawrence Hill’s SOMEONE KNOWS MY NAME. In it, Hill exquisitely imagines the tale of an eighteenth-century woman’s life, spanning six decades and three continents. The fascinating story that Hill tells is a work of the soul and the imagination. Aminata is a character who will stir listeners, from her kid­napping from Africa through her journeys back and forth across the ocean.

Enslaved on a South Carolina plantation, Aminata works in the indigo fields and as a mid­wife. When she is bought by an entrepreneur from Charleston, she is torn from friends and family. The chaos of the Revolutionary War allows her to escape. In British-held Manhattan, she helps pen the Book of Negroes, a list of blacks rewarded for wartime service to the King with safe passage to Nova Scotia. During her travels in Canada, Sierra Leone, and England, Aminata strives for her free­dom and that of her people–even when it comes at a price.

In this captivating novel, Hill portrays one woman’s remarkable spirit and strength in the face of adversity, and he brings to life crucial and little-known chapters in world history.

Ratings and reviews

A heart wrenching and important read...important because we must always remember our past,good and bad,to help us to avoid the same abhorrent behaviors and to help us celebrate the people who survived that history. A story based on what the life of one blank woman endured from childhood in freedom in her home country of Africa to slavery in the colonies and freedom once again. wonderfully written and could not stop listening! i wish i could actually meet "Amenata Deablow"(not spelled correctly most likely since i listened to this on an audio format.)

It is beautifully written. The story was extremely captivating and difficult to put down.

Absulutly loved this book

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. It was also 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.

Adenrele Ojo is a native Philadelphian who was born in Brooklyn, New York, and currently resides in Los Angeles. First trained as a dancer as a little girl, she went on to study as a part of Philadanco’s Training Program; later she received her Bachelor of the Arts in theater from Hunter College in New York and honed her skills at the William Esper Studio, studying Meisner under the auspices of Maggie Flanigan.    Nominated for an L.A. Stage Alliance Ovation Award for Featured Actress in a Play for her role as Martha Pentecost in the Fountain Theater’s 2006 production of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Adenrele Ojo, theatre brat (her dad, John E. Allen, Jr. was Founder & Artistic Director of Freedom Theatre, the oldest African American theater in Pennsylvania) is no stranger to the stage. In 2010 she performed in the Fountain Theatre’s production of The Ballad of Emmett Till by Ifa Bayeza, directed by Shirley Jo Finney, which won the 2010 L.A. Stage Alliance Ovation Award & the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award for Best Ensemble. Other plays include August Wilson’s Jitney and Freedom Theatre’s own Black Nativity (2007), where she played Mary.