Andre Dubus III Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of The Best Spiritual Writing Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Andre Dubus III
Andre Dubus III is the cousin of James Lee Burke and Andre Dubus. He’s an American short story writer and novelist.

“House of Sand and Fog” was made into an Oscar nominated movie that starred Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly in 2013. It was also a New York Times Bestseller and a finalist for a National Book Award.

Andre has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and two Pushcart Prizes.

His work has been included in The Best Spiritual Writing and The Best American Essays anthologies.

“Bluesman” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 1993. In this novel he captures a rolling time in American history and the coming of age for a boy that has to decide between ambition, desire, and duty.

Summer of 1967. Leo Suther has got another year of high school to complete and a whole lot more to learn. He is in love with the beautiful Allie Donovan that introduces him to Chick, her dad who is an avowed Communist and a construction foreman. Leo soon finds himself in the midst of this consuming love affair and quite the intense testing of his political values.

Chick’s passionate views challenge Leo’s perspective on the escalating Vietnam conflict and on just where he truly stands in relation to all the new people in his life. Throughout his, and the nation’s, unforgettable “summer of love”, Leo’s learning the language of the blues, which seem to speak to the mourning that he feels for his dead mom, his occasionally distant dad, and the youth which is fast giving way to manhood.

“House of Sand and Fog” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 1999. A former colonel in the Iranian Air Force (a recent immigrant from the Middle East) yearns to restore his family’s dignity in California through buying the woman’s home. A recovering addict and alcoholic down on her luck struggles to hang onto the single thing that she’s got left: her home. And her lover, who is a married cop, gets driven to extremes in order to win her love.

Andre’s unforgettable characters, people with ordinary flaws that are looking for a small piece of ground to stand on, careen toward inevitable conflict. Their tragedy paints this shockingly true portrait of the country that we live in today.

“The Garden of Last Days” is the third stand alone novel and was released in 2008. One early September night in Florida, this stripper brings her daughter to work. April’s typical babysitter is in the hospital, so she figures it is best to have her three year old daughter close by, watching children’s videos in the office, as she works.

But April works at the Puma Club for Men, and tonight she’s got an unusual client, this foreigner both too personal and yet remote, and free with his money. All cash, and a lot of it. Bassam is the guy’s name. At the same time, AJ has been ejected from the club for holding hands with his favorite stripper, and he is angry, drunk, and lonely.

Out of these explosive elements comes this raw, relentless, passionate, page turning, searing narrative, a painful and big hearted novel all about parenthood and sex and masculinity and honor. Set in the seamy underside of American life right at the moment just before the world changed, it juxtaposes lust for domination with hunger for connection, family love with sexual violence.

This novel seizes the reader right by their throat with the same psychological tension, realism, and depth that also characterized Andre’s bestseller “House of Sand and Fog”, and an even greater sense of the anguished and dark places within the human heart.

This is a big hearted, page turning, and painful novel. Readers found this to be a subtle and affecting portrait of two hostile yet equally fragile camps.

“Dirty Love” is the fourth stand alone novel and was released in 2013. Disillusioned intimacy and persistent yearning. Andre explores the stubborn weaknesses and bottomless needs of people that seek gratification in work and love, sex and food.

In these connected novellas in which characters step out the back door of one story and right into the next, love is “dirty”, all tangled up with ego, power, need, boredom, fear, and fantasy. On the Massachusetts coast north of Boston, Mark, a controlling manager, learns about his wife’s infidelity after twenty-five years of marriage. Robert, a philandering bartender and aspiring poet, betrays his pregnant wife. Marla, an overweight young woman, gains this romantic partner yet loses her innocence.

And in the stunning title novella, a teen girl called Devon, fleeing from the dirty image of herself that got posted online, seeks respect in the eyes of her widowed great-uncle Francis and of this Iraq vet that she has met while surfing online.

Slivered by discontent and happiness, death and aging, yet also persistent forgiveness and hope, these are beautifully wrought narratives expressing extraordinary tenderness toward human beings, our vulnerable bodies and hearts, our unfulfilling and fulfilling lives alone as well as with others.

“Gone So Long” is the fifth stand alone novel and was released in 2018. This novel explores how the wounds from the past afflict the people that we wind up becoming.

“Gone So Long” is this riveting family drama about this ex-con that did time for murder, the estranged daughter that he’s not seen in forty years, now, and the grandma that’s angry enough to kill him.

It’s a profound exploration of this struggle between the selves that we wish to be, and the ones (which are shaped by circumstance and chance, as well as character) that we cannot escape. It confirms Andre’s reputation as a novelist whose compassion is unblinking and unsentimental, unwavering and total.

Readers found this to be taut with tension, and ends with just a hint of hope. It is affirming, cathartic, and is steeped in the empathy and precise observations of character for which Andre is celebrated.