Last week I was headed to the pool so I wanted to grab a paperback I owned – the iPad gets too heated, and I didn’t want to ruin a library book.

So I headed to my bookcases and pulled out

The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

I had no idea what this book was about (somehow I also missed the movie!!) and was expecting some sort of slow family drama…but the recommendation on the front cover promised a “page turner” so I decided to give it a try.

The book ended up blowing me away.

A story with two (or actually three) perspectives, the dilemma focuses on a house near San Francisco of which two separate parties claim ownership.

The author builds suspense I would have thought impossible around such a topic. The characters, mostly unlikable, are so developed that I could understand them. If only they could understand each other!

At many times this reads like a domestic thriller where I wanted to scream at the woman making more and more bad choices – NO DON’T DO THAT – but this book was so much more. Using cultural differences, scenery, obsessions, and addictions, this author writes such a detailed and engaging story that I could not put this book down. I read it in three days!

So if you also happen to have missed this when it came out in 1999 (and the movie too), I recommend picking the book up as blindly as I did and settling in for an engrossing read.