Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

For my parents

Epigraph

My eye conversed while my tongue gazed; my ear spoke and my hand listened; and while my ear was an eye to behold everything visible, my eye was an ear listening to song.

—Farid ud-Din Attar

Praise

Acclaim for Lorraine Adams’s HARBOR

“Mesmerizing. . . . A ripping read. . . . A heartrending cautionary tale of American justice gone awry.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Remarkable. . . . Brilliant. . . . Compelling and haunting. . . . Adams creates an exquisite tension in a character who is at once unseen and yet hunted, both estranged from society and deeply enmeshed in a complicated social order. . . . [Harbor is] a work of art that lifts the veils of many of our assumptions that have formed since 9/11.”

— The Boston Globe

“[A] great, gutsy first novel. . . . Outstanding.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Fascinating. . . . [Adams] writes convincingly from within the hearts and minds of her characters. Though topical, the narrative flies well beneath the headlines.”

—The Oregonian

“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

“Insightful. . . . Adams adds welcome shading to the usual portrayal of the war on terror.”

—U.S. News & World Report

“A disturbing tale where suspicion is enough to trump innocence and the consequences of naïveté are potentially disastrous. . . . Adams humanizes the terrorist threat and convincingly shows how a confined worldview can breed generalizations that may hatch tragic consequences.”

— San Francisco Chronicle

“Brilliant. . . . A strong and disturbing book.”

—Annie Proulx, Book-of-the-Month Club News

“Adams displays a gift for detail and character that takes us fully inside the complex systems of survival, kinship, and religious ideology which form Aziz’s world.”

—The New Yorker

“Adams is a sharp observer of the current war-on-terror politics. [Harbor] counters the media’s easy perceptions in our age of xenophobia by immersing readers in the depths of myriad characters.”

—The Dallas Morning News

“Mesmerizing. . . . A timely and grippingly written book, Harbor helps give the war on terror a human face.” —People

“Adams drags her characters through the wheels of fate and makes them sing. . . . [Her] sentences move with speed and visual economy, but also contain poetic beauties. . . . A compelling story with great characters—timely, suspenseful and profound.”

—Ruminator Review

“A powerful look at America through immigrant eyes that is not only timely but essential in our post–9/11 society.”

—Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“[Adams] writes with verve and is so convincing that it often seems that this is a true story instead of fiction. . . . A story about complex interaction between human beings of greatly differing cultures, written by an author of enormous talent.”

—Deseret Morning News

Chapter 1

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