House of Sand and Fog

House of Sand and Fog is a novel by the American writer Andre Dubus III, published in 1999 by W. W. Norton. It was selected for Oprah's Book Club in 2000, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, and was adapted for film in 2003.

The book is told by more than one of the people it involves. Massoud Behrani was a colonel in the Iranian air force and left Iran after the revolution; in the United States his background has not transferred into a career, and he works as a trash collector and in a convenience store while keeping up appearances among fellow exiles, paying for an expensive apartment and a lavish wedding for his daughter. Kathy Nicolo is a recovering addict whose husband has left her, and who loses her family's house to a tax sale that should never have happened. Behrani buys the house at auction for his family, and the two of them are then locked in a dispute in which each has a genuine claim and neither can afford to give way. Kathy's involvement with a married police officer adds a third party with his own reasons to take her side.

Dubus writes the chapters in the voices of the people involved, and the novel's tension comes from showing how reasonable both sides are from the inside.