Harbor | Granta

  • Published: 09/03/2006
  • ISBN: 9781846270345
  • 129x20mm
  • 304 pages

Harbor

Lorraine Adams

A young stowaway, Aziz, jumps into the icy waters of Boston Harbor and swims ashore. He scrabbles to find shelter with fellow immigrants, tries to live right, but quickly learns that the normal rules don’t apply to those who have no legal existence. Just as Aziz allows himself to forget the atrocities he fled back home in Algeria and to imagine a brighter future, the FBI starts taking an interest in his circle’s activities, and all assumptions – his and ours – dissolve into urgent questions: how are terrorists identified? who watches them? and how do they live in our midst and how do they evade us?

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

Harbor is a powerful, timely yet timeless novel, showing how those who are on the margins can be swept into the net of the 'war against terrorism'. Brilliantly evoked, beautifully written, it evokes the pain of exile and the invisible world of illegals, asylum seekers and crime, rarely understood, but providing the seedbed for alienation. A wonderful book vividly reflecting my own experience in the courts.

Helena Kennedy

The Author

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 New York City, and Harbor (Portobello, 2006) was her first novel.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

The Room And The Chair

Lorraine Adams

A jet aircraft falls straight out of the sky into an island park in the heart of Washington, DC. But noone seems to have noticed. Well, almost noone … At the capital’s paper, the staff are in a frenzy, and the news, and ambition, can blind. In Washington’s other power centre, Will queasily watches videos of a beheading from Falluja while lamenting the loss of his best double-agent, eliminated by the Iranian authorities whose nuclear intentions he was reporting. But that agent, Hoseyn, might yet provide the missing pieces that will permit the jigsaw to be completed from beyond his own death …

Lorraine Adams on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

The Trials of Faisal Shahzad

Lorraine Adams & Ayesha Nasir

Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Lorraine Adams and Pakistani reporter Ayesha Nasir examine the life of Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American who attempted to detonate a massive car bomb in New York’s Times Square.