It turns both the traditional immigrant success story and a modern love story upside down with a heart rending outcome, in a masterstroke of American realism and Shakespearean consequence. Unfolding relentlessly from its tense and colorful first lines, House of Sand and Fog is a narrative triumph. These are people with ordinary flaws, people just looking for a small piece of ground to stand on, driven by the same needs into inevitable conflict - a conflict in which even the reader, rooting for all of them, has no safe haven. Dubus has an extraordinary ability to get us inside each of his characters, to see the world as it is for each of them. 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. 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 children. On a road crew in California, a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force under the Shah yearns to restore his family's dignity. And a small house will seem like the most important piece of territory in the world. "In this page-turning, breathtaking novel, the characters will walk off the page and into your life. Signed by the author with thin black pen on a Palm Beach Literary Society bookplate which is neatly affixed to the center of the blank first free front endpaper. Includes List of Other Books by Andre Dubus III, Author Dedication Preliminary Page Quote and Acknowledgments. Fine unread condition speckled beige boards with a silver gray spine and silver spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped illustrated dust jacket. His realization comes too late to prevent the tragedy that unfolds: the novel concludes with Esmail, Nadereh, and Behrani shot dead and Kathy and Lester in prison.Hardcover. Lester later breaks into the Corona house-fearing for Kathy's safety-and holds at gunpoint the very people, he soon realizes, who saved Kathy's life. She again tries to kill herself, and this time her life is saved by Nadereh, Behrani's wife. (In response to this threat, Behrani files a formal complaint the next morning.) A day later, Kathy attempts suicide but is rescued by Behrani. One evening, Officer Lester Burdon, believing that it's not right for Kathy to lose her house to wealthy foreigners because of a bureaucratic error, threatens Behrani by stating that the INS deports people every day. Kathy pleads with Behrani (and talks with his wife and son, Nadereh (Nadi) and Esmail). However, a police officer named Lester Burdon, who happened to be on duty the day Kathy was evicted, falls in love with her the two create a temporary home at a friend's fishing cabin on the Purisima River-a stiflingly hot cabin where there is no running water, no electricity, and no phone, and where mosquitoes abound.Ĭonflict over the house in Corona is the core of this novel. Although Kathy has redress through the courts, she has nowhere to live while her lawyer's suit against the tax office makes its way through the courts. He says he will only sell it back to them for the house's full market value. After Kathy's state-paid lawyer gives notice to the San Mateo County Tax Office, the county recognizes and admits its error and asks Behrani to sell the house back for the full auction price, thereafter to be returned to Kathy. When Kathy was evicted from her Corona house, she was served papers, one containing a telephone number for a Legal Aid office (under California law, those who could not afford lawyers were given access to the courts through such offices). citizens, at this point his new in-laws are not yet. Several weeks prior, his daughter Soraya had married into a wealthy Iranian immigrant family. Since the house's purchase price was about 1/4 of its market value, Behrani's plan is to resell it for profit. He quickly pays the remaining $35,000 in cash, and, within weeks, has his family moved out of its Berkeley apartment and into the Corona house, from which Kathy was now evicted. Behrani gives the county a $10,000 certified check drawn on the Bank of America as down payment. Her house is purchased at a public auction by Genob Sarhang Massoud Amir Behrani (formerly a colonel in the Imperial Airforce of Iranian dictator Reza Shah Pahlavi) for $45,000. In the summer of 1993, Kathy Nicolo is mistakenly evicted from her house-34 Bisgrove Street in Corona, California-because she did not pay the back-taxes owed by the owner of the house at 34 Biscove Street.
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