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 resotre 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.
Editorial Reviews
"A page-turner with a beating heart." —The Boston Globe
"A mixture of classical tragedy perfectly imbued with film noir....House of Sand and Fog is the work of a writer who is the real thing." —The Baltimore Sun
"Elegant and powerful.... An unusual and volatile literary thriller." —The Washington Post Book World
"House of Sand and Fog is one of the best American novels I've ever read." —James Lee Burke
About the Author
Andre Dubus III is the author of The Garden of Last Days, House of Sand and Fog (a #1 New York Times bestseller, Oprah’s Book Club pick, and finalist for the National Book Award) and Townie, winner of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His writing has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Magazine Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his family north of Boston.
![Published in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables was conceived by Nathaniel Hawthorne as a modern-day sequel to The Scarlet Letter, which had appeared the year before. Set in Salem, the story's dramatic center revolved around two elederly characters, Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon, as they struggle to free themselves from a centuries-old family curse, ghostly forebears, and a crippling sense of hereditary guilt. They find themselves aided in their quest by their young cousin, Phoebe, and a mysterious daguerreotypist named Holgrave, who has taken up residence with them. Watching over this human drama, as if awaiting its outcome, is the brooding House of the Seven Gables, the Pyncheon ancestral home.
In this book Hawthorne hoped to dispel the gloom of the Puritan past that pervades The Scarlet Letter. Whether or not he succeeded has long been a matter of opinion. Hawthorne's wife, Sophia, praised her husband's new romance for its "dear home-loveliness and satisfaction," while Herman Melville found it a damnably dark and subversive work: "[Hawthorne] says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes."](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ezptpblrxu/images/stencil/500x659/products/428/805/HouseSevenGables__63675.1659472144.jpg?c=2 "Published in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables was conceived by Nathaniel Hawthorne as a modern-day sequel to The Scarlet Letter, which had appeared the year before. Set in Salem, the story's dramatic center revolved around two elederly characters, Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon, as they struggle to free themselves from a centuries-old family curse, ghostly forebears, and a crippling sense of hereditary guilt. They find themselves aided in their quest by their young cousin, Phoebe, and a mysterious daguerreotypist named Holgrave, who has taken up residence with them. Watching over this human drama, as if awaiting its outcome, is the brooding House of the Seven Gables, the Pyncheon ancestral home.
In this book Hawthorne hoped to dispel the gloom of the Puritan past that pervades The Scarlet Letter. Whether or not he succeeded has long been a matter of opinion. Hawthorne's wife, Sophia, praised her husband's new romance for its \"dear home-loveliness and satisfaction,\" while Herman Melville found it a damnably dark and subversive work: \"[Hawthorne] says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes.\"")
