Harbor
By: Lorraine Adams.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Knopf; Distributed by Random House
Published: 2004
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 291
Subjects: Algerians -- United States -- Fiction.; Illegal aliens -- Fiction.; Stowaways -- Fiction.; Violence -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
Description: "We first meet Aziz Arkoun as a twenty-four-year-old stowaway - frozen, hungry, his perceptions jammed by a language he can't understand or speak. After fifty-two 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?"--BOOK JACKET.