Harbor

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by Lorraine Adams

Alfred A. Knopf: Random House

Due/Published August 2004, 304 pages, cloth

ISBN 140004233X

A powerful first novel that engages the tumultuous events of today: at once an intimate portrait of a group of young Arab Muslims living in the United States, and the story of one man's journey into-and out of-violence.
We first meet Aziz Arkoun as a 24-year-old stowaway-frozen, hungry, his perceptions jammed by a language he can't understand or speak. After 52 days in the hold of a tanker from Algeria, he jumps into the icy waters of Boston harbor and swims to shore. Seemingly rescued from isolation by Algerians he knew as a child, he instead finds himself in a world of disillusionment, duplicity, and stolen identities, living a raw comedy of daily survival not unlike what he fled back home.
As the story of Aziz and his friends unfolds-moving from the hardscrabble neighborhoods of East Boston and Brooklyn to a North African army camp-"Harbor makes vivid the ambiguities of these men's past and present lives: burying a murdered girl in the Sahara; reading medieval Persian poetry on a bus, passing for Mexican; shoplifting Versace for clubbing, succumbing to sex in a public library; impersonating a double agent. But when Aziz begins to suspect that he and his friends are under surveillance, all assumptions-his and ours-dissolve in an urgent, mesmerizing complexity.
And as "Harbor races to its explosive conclusion, it compels us to question the questions it raises: Who are the
terrorists? Can we recognize them? How do they live?
A debut novel as evocative as it is convincing-a groundbreaking work that announces a fearless new voice in American fiction.