House of Sand and Fog

By: Andre Dubus

Narrated by: Andre Dubus, Fontaine Dollas Dubus

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.

©2001 Andre Dubus III; © and (P)2001 HarperCollinsPublishers Inc. All rights reserved.

Great Listening

Enjoyed this book and didn't want to interupt my listening time.

Riveting... Until it wasn't

At the beginning of the book I was raptured. The plot took a while to kick off but the characters were fascinating and kept me interested. After the climax-ish of the book it just dragged along. The falling action hardly played on these complicated and deep characters at all and then it was just kind of... over. Overall a really good book but don't expect much past the climax.

Dark

Though a dark and at times depressing tale, it was a different kind of thoughtful story. Bleak as it was, the characters were unusual and unique. Definitely a clash of cultures so stark it was a learning experience. The reading was well done...but I did tire of Cathy's whiny voice!

Like the movie with more detail

overall seeing the movie first and book second is a good idea for an series because you are typically disappointed by the movie. but now reading the book, I can say the screen adaption is fantastic. of course there are more details but really both are well done.

Astounding characterizations, and wonderfully read

I found this audiobook absolutely riveting -- almost perfectly read, with the important twist of having separate male and female voices, given that the book is mostly a series of interior monologues from the various characters. Yes, you know they are all spiraling down to disaster, but the author has caught the internal voices of the characters very well, sometimes exquisitely. The Irani ex-colonel is particularly finely wrought, but I found the others well done also. The book is a meditation on the many different ways we organize our relationships with others, and how many different ways those relationships can fall apart. Father, mother, husband, wife, child, sibling, lover, immigrant, native, boss, subordinate, trainee, soldier in a strict military hierarchy -- Dubus manages to explore and say something interesting about all of these ties, with a bit of political and economic commentary that is subordinate to the more important themes. An amazing audiobook, one of the most satisfying I have listened to. My only criticism -- the brief interludes of music between sections are jarringly inappropriate. One caveat to this review: I have not seen the movie, so I came to the book without any movie-induced preconceptions.