Oprah Book Club® Selection, November 2000: Andre Dubus III wastes no time in capturing the dark side of the immigrant experience in America at the end of the 20th century. House of Sand and Fog opens with a highway crew composed of several nationalities picking up litter on a hot California summer day. Massoud Amir Behrani, a former colonel in the Iranian military under the Shah, reflects on his job-search efforts since arriving in the U.S. four years before: "I have spent hundreds of dollars copying my credentials; I have worn my French suits and my Italian shoes to hand-deliver my qualifications; I have waited and then called back after the correct waiting time; but there is nothing." The father of two, Behrani has spent most of the money he brought with him from Iran on an apartment and furnishings that are too expensive, desperately trying to keep up appearances in order to enhance his daughter's chances of making a good marriage. Now the daughter is married, and on impulse he sinks his remaining funds into a house he buys at auction, thus unwittingly putting himself and his family on a trajectory to disaster. The house, it seems, once belonged to Kathy Nicolo, a self-destructive alcoholic who wants it back. What starts out as a legal tussle soon escalates into a personal confrontation--with dire results. Dubus tells his tragic tale from the viewpoints of the two main adversaries, Behrani and Kathy. To both of them, the house represents something more than just a place to live. For the colonel, it is a foot in the door of the American dream; for Kathy, a reminder of a kinder, gentler past. In prose that is simple yet evocative, House of Sand and Fog builds to its inevitable denouement, one that is painfully dark but unfailingly honest. --Alix Wilber


From Publishers Weekly
Dubus has created a novel that is nearly perfectly suited to the audio format. Kathy Nicolo is a recovering addict whose husband has left her and who is making her way in the straight world with her own cleaning business. When her house in the California hills is mistakenly seized by the county for back taxes and sold at public auction, she finds herself living out of her car and on the brink of desperation. Once a wealthy and powerful man in Iran and a colonel in the army under the Shah's rule, Behrani is now a struggling immigrant who hopes that he can sell the house for a large profit, so that he can once again provide his family with a lifestyle like the one they enjoyed in Iran. Emotions take precedence over ethics, logic, love and the law as their paths collide in a surprising and tragic conclusion. The reading by the author and his wife is sublime. Dubus's performance as the hot-headed Behrani is frightening in its intensity. His wife captures Kathy's dispassionate disbelief with a flat distance that is as effectively realistic as it is palpable. Based on the Norton hardcover. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In his second novel (after Bluesman, LJ 5/15/93), the son of noted writer Andre Dubus manages to get deep inside the heads of two very different characters who clash over a modest house in the San Francisco suburbs. Kathy is a recovering alcoholic and cokehead who loses her inherited bungalow for alleged nonpayment of taxes. Behmini, an Iranian who was an officer in the Shah's air force before fleeing the revolution, is now struggling to succeed in the United States. He buys the house at auction, planning to make a profit on the resale. Kathy skulks around the neighborhood and eventually confronts the family. When she becomes sexually involved with the policeman she met at her eviction, a married man with bad judgment and a drinking problem of his own, he takes up her cause with explosive results. Dubus's attention to detail and realistic prose style give the narrative a hard-edged, cinematic quality, but unlike many movies, its outcome is unexpected. Recommended for all fiction collections.AReba Leiding, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VACopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Los Angeles Times, Richard Eder, 21 February 1999
"Dubus sets out the growing confrontation with chilly ingenuity and a remarkably observant compassion.... [A] fine and prophetic novel."


Boston Globe,
"Dubus...is clearly a talent to be reckoned with...."House of Sand and Fog" is a page-turner with a beating heart."


From AudioFile
Andre Dubus reads for the stern Iranian colonel who lost almost everything escaping with his precious family to the U.S. after the fall of the Shah. "In my country I could have had him beaten," he says of a man he works with on the highway crew. Fontaine Dubus reads for Kathy Nicolo, the hapless young beauty whose house the colonel buys in a tax auction. Colonel Behrani needs that house to save his family from poverty. Kathy won't give it up. When an American cop falls in love with the hapless beauty, we've got all the ingredients for an old-fashioned tragedy. Brilliantly written, and presented with feeling, this is one of the saddest stories ever told. B.H.C. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
In an enthralling tragedy built on a foundation of small misfortunes, Dubus (Bluesman, 1993, etc.) offers in detail the unraveling life of a woman who, in her undoing, brings devastation to the families of those in her path. It was bad enough when Kathy Lazaro stepped out of the shower one morning to find herself evicted from her house, a small bungalow to be auctioned the very next day in a county tax sale; bad enough that her recovering-addict husband had left her some time before, and that she had no friends at all in California to help her move or put her up. Then she also had to fall for the guy who evicted her, Deputy Les Burdonmarried, with two kids. Sympathetic to her plight, Les lines up legal counsel and makes sure she has a place to stay, but his optimism (and the lawyer's) hits an immovable object in proud ex-Colonel Behrani, formerly of the Iranian Air Force, who fled his homeland with his family when the Shah was deposed and who has struggled secretly in San Francisco for years to maintain appearances until his daughter can make a good marriage. He's sunken his remaining life savings into buying Kathy's house, at a tremendous bargain, planning to reinvent himself as a real-estate speculator, and he has no wish to sell it back when informed that the county made a bureaucratic error. Hounded by both Kathy and Leswho has moved out, guiltily, on his family and brought his lover, herself a recovering addict, back to the bar sceneBehrani is increasingly unable to shield his wife and teenaged son from the ugly truth, but he still won't yield. Then Kathy tries to kill herself, and Les takes the law into his own hands . . . . No villains here, but only precisely rendered proof that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

ANNOTATION

1999 National Book Award finalist, Fiction.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this riveting novel of almost unbearable suspense, three fragile yet determined people become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Colonel Behrani, once a wealthy man in Iran, is now a struggling immigrant willing to bet everything he has to restore his family's dignity. Kathy Nicolo is a troubled young woman whose house is all she has left, and who refuses to let her hard-won stability slip away from her. Sheriff Lester Burdon, a married man who finds himself falling in love with Kathy, becomes obsessed with helping her fight for justice.

Drawn by their competing desires to the same small house in the California hills and doomed by their tragic inability to understand one another, the three converge in an explosive collision course. Combining unadorned realism with profound empathy, House of Sand and Fog marks the arrival of a major new voice in American fiction.

SYNOPSIS

House of Sand and Fog has been named a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award in Fiction.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Dubus's chronicle of the American Dream gone awry is distinguished by his sympathetic delineation of lower-middle class life.

Bill Sharp - New York Times Book Review

[E]xamines what happens when ordinary men and women move across the tenuous barrier between the normal and the irrational....a story...about how people...are repeatedly trapped by circumstances and transformed...

Mirabella

Unputdownable...a page-turner that's a mind-opener...a thriller with moral complexity.

San Francisco Chronicle

A craftsman of character and dialogue, Dubus has dared to push his limits.

Richard Eder - Los Angeles Times

A fine and prophetic novel. Read all 14 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Tom Wolfe

House of Sand and Fog is a novel of terrible truths. Everyone here wants what we want -- love, justice, a home -- and all their good intentions collide, violently, inevitably, in a story of remarkable power and veracity and tenderness. Andrew Dubus III has a keen and generous eye, and a great gift of bestowing dignity on even the most confused of his people. I cared for them all, and mourned their fates. — Author of A Man in Full

House of Sand and Fog is one of the best American novels I've ever read.
 — James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke