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?
