Harbor

(Paperback)

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Description

After 52 days in the hold of a tanker from Algeria, a young stowaway jumps into the icy waters of Boston Harbor and swims to shore. Frozen and hungry, Aziz scrabbles to make contact with the one person he knows in America and manages to find shelter within a small enclave of fellow immigrants, where he quickly learns that the normal rules don't apply to those who have no legal existence, and the best way to survive sometimes means turning a blind eye. But even as Aziz allows himself to forget the atrocities he fled back home and imagine a brighter future, the FBI start taking an interest in his friends' activities and all assumptions - his and ours - dissolve into urgent, mesmerizing questions: How are terrorists identified Who watches them and decides when to act How do they live in our midst and how do they evade us No more timely or more searching novel from America will be published this year, and seldom does any debut novel display Harbor's level of empathy, reach and power.

Reviews

A mesmerizingly convincing story about our multi-cultural world that was awarded the LA Times First Fiction Prize Adams brings her Pulitzer Prize-winning journalistic insight into the vivid human story behind the issues that are making the news headlines 'Brilliantly, Adams pulls all the different threads together ... A strong and disturbing book.' Annie Proulx 'With its international scope [and] its constant play of literary ambiguity and genre suspense, Harbor feels more contemporary than almost anything else out there ... Convincing and utterly compelling.' Time

Author Bio

LORRAINE ADAMS was educated at Princeton and at Columbia University. She won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and was a staff writer for the Washington Post for eleven years. She lives in Washington, DC, and is at work on her second novel.