House Of Sand And Fog
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- £1.99
Publisher Description
When Kathy, a young recovering alcoholic recently separated from her husband, fails to a open a series of tax letters that have been sent to her in error, the State of California seizes the house she and her brother have inherited from her father. The State sells the house at auction to Behrani, a former Iranian Air Force officer. Unable to parley his skills into a job in aerospace in the US, the house represents an entry into real estate and a passport to the future of his family and his own version of the American Dream. For Kathy, its loss is the last of a series of insults life has dealt her. When she becomes involved with a married policeman who takes up her cause, the stage is set for a gut-wrenching tragedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This powerfully written but bleak narrative is a mesmerizing tale of the American Dream gone terribly awry. Massoud Amir Behrani, a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force under the Shah, now lives in exile with his wife and teenage son near San Francisco. Working on a road crew as a "garbage soldier" by day and as a deli clerk by night, Behrani is obsessed with restoring his family to the position of glittering wealth and prestige it once enjoyed. At a county auction, he sinks his savings into a bungalow seized for non-payment of taxes, and quickly moves his family into it, planning to resell the house at a sizable profit. But when the house's previous occupant, recovering coke addict Kathy Lazaro, resurfaces with valid claims for repossession, Behrani's plan begins to unravel, and with it his tightly controlled facade of composure. Tensions between Lazaro and Behrani quickly escalate into violence, as Lazaro's lover, a married police officer with a weak spot for lost causes, decides to take matters into his own hands. The book's horrifying denouement offers readers a searing study in the wages of pride. Dubus (Bluesman) writes with an authority regarding the American lower middle class that is reminiscent of Russell Banks and Richard Ford, and his limber imagination is capable of drawing the inner lives of three very different main characters with such compassion that readers will find their sympathies hopelessly divided. If the tragedy that he so skillfully orchestrates cries out to be leavened with a little less desperation and some quiet glimpse of hope, the keenly perceptive and moving narrative is proof that the son and namesake of one of our most talented writers has embarked on a dazzling career in his own right.
