House of sand and fog

Andre Dubus

W W Norton & Company Incorporated, 1999 - Fiction - 365 pages

Tense with suspense from the first line, this is one of the great American realist novels. In this page-turning, breathtaking novel, the characters will walk off the page and into your life. And a small house will seem like the most important piece of territory in the world.

On a road crew in California, a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force under the Shah yearns to restore his family's dignity. When an attractive bungalow comes available on county auction for a fraction of its value, he sees a great opportunity for himself, his wife, and his children. But the house's former owner, a recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck, doesn't see it that way, nor does her lover, a married cop driven to extremes to win her love and get her house back.

House of Sand and Fog is a narrative triumph in which a traditional immigrant success story and a modern love story are turned upside down with brutal, heartrending consequences. It is an American tragedy, and a shockingly true picture of the country we live in today.

What people are saying

Review: House of Sand and Fog

User Review  - Book Concierge - Goodreads

It starts with a bureaucratic mistake. Massoud Behrani, formerly part of the Shah of Iran's elite inner circle, is working two menial jobs in an effort to maintain a semblance of the wealth and status ...

Review: House of Sand and Fog

User Review  - Casilde - Goodreads

I am a little surprised reading all of the reviews by other people of this book. No one supports Kathy in this endeavor. Everyone has mainly sympathy for Behrani and his moral stance and I must admit ...

About the author

Andre Dubus III was born on September 11, 1959 in Oceanside, California. He is the son of the acclaimed writer Andre Dubus, and mystery writer James Lee Burke is his cousin. Dubus attended Bradford College, where his father taught, and then switched to the University of Texas at Austin where he studied sociology, political science and economics. He dropped out of a Ph.D. program, signed on at a construction site, and began boxing. A friend convinced Dubus to start writing, and he wrote in his spare time till getting a job teaching writing at Emerson. He has also worked as a private investigator, corrections counselor, and bounty hunter, as well as various other jobs. As an actor he has appeared in numerous stage plays and three independent films. He is also a general contractor and carpenter. Dubus is the author of the story collection The Cage Keeper and other Stories and the novels Bluesman, House of Sand and Fog (which was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award and was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film), and The Garden of Last Days. Dubus has garnered other distinctions, including a Pushcart Prize and a 1985 National Magazine Award for Fiction. He has also been published in short story anthologies, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and numerous literary reviews. Dubus teaches creative writing courses at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and has also taught writing at Harvard University and Tufts University.

Bibliographic information

• Title: House of sand and fog
• Author: Andre Dubus
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated, 1999
• ISBN: 0393046974, 9780393046977
• Length: 365 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary