Harbor - Rilegato

“A captivating book . . . Not only engrossing but important . . . A virtuoso act of the imagination, one that reminds us of fiction’s deepest ambition . . . Intricately plotted and beautifully written . . . A remarkable act of artistic empathy.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Luminous . . . Heart-stopping . . . Adams draws her characters with compassion and humor . . . [Her] Algerians call to mind the Lower East Side immigrants in Michael Gold’s 1930 novel Jews Without Money, or Amy Tan’s Chinese, or Oscar Hijuelos’s Cubans or Jhumpa Lahiri’s Indians.” –Washington Post Book World

“Mesmerizing . . . A ripping read: Its narrative sweeps along like a Sunday-night TV drama, and its cast of young Muslim men is drawn with a stylish realism worthy of Zola . . . A heart-rending cautionary tale of American justice gone awry.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Adams unfolds [the story] with artful suspense . . . [Aziz] is a philosophical, hopeful, and overwhelmingly sympathetic character . . . Complex, vibrant, and imaginative . . . as compelling as it is necessary.” –Esquire

“In Harbor, the pall of terrorism and the fear it inspires turns a would-be Horatio Alger immigrant story into a disturbing tale . . . Adams humanizes the terrorist threat and convincingly shows how a confined worldview can breed generalizations that may hatch tragic consequences.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“An insightful chronicle of the life of an Islamic immigrant [who] enters a world of poverty and violence not much better than the one he left behind in Algeria . . . Adams adds welcome shading to the usual portrayal of the war on terror.” –U.S. News & World Report

“A chilling story of identity and loss culled from real-life experiences . . . A cautionary tale that asks readers to be open-minded . . . [Adams] never loses sight of a story that alternates between incredible moments of joy and sadness.” –Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

“Razor-sharp . . . Vivid, fast-paced . . . [An] underworld of illegal America revealed in film noir fashion . . . A terrific book.” –The Miami Herald

“Endlessly fascinating . . . 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

“Mesmerizing . . . Adams masterfully conveys the shock of landing in America with no green card, no English, not even a change of clothes . . . Timely and grippingly written . . . Harbor helps give the war on terror a human face."
–People (four out of four stars)

“[A] great, gutsy first novel . . . Harbor homes in on the most demonized population in America: young Islamic men living in big East Coast cities . . . Who, this cool, compassionate novel asks, are these people? . . . Outstanding.” –Entertainment Weekly

“Brilliantly, Adams pulls all the different threads together . . . A strong and disturbing book.” –Annie Proulx, Book-of-The Month Club News

“One of America’s oldest stories, the immigrant adventure, is magically new in this stunning debut about Algerians in Boston. Aziz is 24, ‘a feather of a man,’ but strong and resourceful enough to have survived 52 days as a stowaway in the hold of a tanker. Now, despite badly burned feet, he is swimming for dear life in Boston Harbor . . . America is a confusing hubbub for Aziz, yet it has the charm of a blank slate. . . . While Aziz remains the protagonist, the story fans out to include his kid brother Mourad (the lucky devil won a green card) and another stowaway, the charismatic go-getter Ghazi . . . Through flashbacks, Adams, a veteran Washington Post reporter, makes brave forays into Algeria and its blood-soaked, byzantine factional strife, so we can understand why Aziz, fending off both the army and a band of murderous Islamists that abducted him, ran from the killing fields. Through it all, Aziz preserves an essential innocence, so it’s bitterly ironic that he becomes the prime suspect of a stumbling FBI task force trying to destroy an alleged terrorist cell . . . Adams runs the gamut from farce to horror . . . A fine success.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Stunning . . . This first novel by Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Adams stops just short of drawing conclusions about the predicament of illegal immigrants in America, particularly those from countries in turmoil. Aziz Arkoun, the protagonist of this story, is a modern-day Job, haunted by the trauma of his forced military service in Algeria and his accidental desertion, followed by the harrowing experience of stowing away–and then jumping from–a tanker headed for Boston. Once in America, his life does not markedly improve, as the distant cousin around which he builds his life seems to put him in danger at every turn . . . Arkoun’s story is told in simple language, but the conversations between him and those around him resonate with the echoes of their native tongue, full of colorful poetry. The questions about political asylum raised by this novel, sadly, have no easy answers.” –Debi Lewis, Booklist

“Provocative . . . Set in the months before 9/11, this immigrant tale/thriller invokes a whole range of cultural stereotypes and misunderstandings, as the police race to prevent what they perceive to be an imminent terrorist attack . . . Readers will find...depth and complexity.” –Lawrence Rungren, Library Journal

“The uncertain lives of illegal Algerian immigrants are the subject of this compelling, topical debut novel. Adams, a Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist, brings a reporter’s eye for detail to the story, which begins with Aziz Arkoun’s arrival in Boston Harbor . . . [She] reveals and conceals just enough to keep readers almost as disoriented as Aziz, who, with no English and ruined health, survives almost by chance. But Aziz has fled Algeria, where he was an accidental double agent for Islamist militants, for another kind of brutish existence: intermittent minimum-wage employment, shady compatriots and FBI scrutiny . . . Aziz flees to Brooklyn, and [his friend] Ghazi to Montreal, where he’s seduced by a life of crime and by the ‘Allah-talk’ of a childhood acquaintance who aspires to be a node in an international terrorist network. Aziz is no ‘prayer-boy,’ but for the FBI there are too few degrees of separation between him and a terrorist cell. Adams’s lucid, psychologically complicated page-turner captures the ambiguities of and raises important questions about the domestic war on terror.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Lorraine Adams was educated at Princeton University and was a graduate fellow at Columbia University, where she received a master’s degree in literature. A staff writer for the Washington Post for 11 years, she won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. She lives in Washington, D.C., and is at work on her second novel.