In the best-selling House of Sand and Fog (1999), Dubus engineered an electrifying conflict between an American woman and an Iranian colonel in exile. In his long-awaited new novel, Dubus fashions another disturbing and revealing encounter between an American woman on the edge and an intense Muslim man. But in this risky and relentless tale set on the verge of 9/11, sexual mores serve as a gauge of the perilous divide between American freedom and Muslim extremism. April is a single mother living in Florida and working as a stripper. When Jean, her babysitter and landlady, is unexpectedly hospitalized, she brings her three-year-old daughter to the Puma Club for Men, clearly courting trouble. And sure enough, while April performs in private for Bassam, a high-strung stranger with a surplus of cash and misery, all hell breaks loose. Narrating commandingly in five voices, Dubus ramps up the suspense while circling back to reveal April's cruel indoctrination into the stripper's life, the tragedy that made Bassam a jihadist, Jean's sorrows, Lonnie the bouncer's secret, and the dangerous despair of a man he forcibly ejects from the club. Improvising on the pre-attack actions of the 9/11 terrorists, Dubus' hyperdetailed, visceral, and prurient yet undeniably compassionate thriller boldly explores the bewildering complexities of sexuality, and the dire repercussions of isolation and desperation.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist

An explosive narrative employs a Florida strip club as a tinderbox of tensions on the weekend before 9/11. In similar fashion to his previous bestseller (House of Sand and Fog, 1999), Dubus shows a profound empathy as he gets inside the heads of a number of characters, with coincidence, chance and a clash of cultures building to a shattering climax. Through quick-cutting chapters (few longer than ten pages, many as short as one or two), he propels the action while providing the back stories that have brought these characters together for a night that will change their lives. April is an uncommonly sober-minded stripper and single mother who saves all her earnings to secure a better future for herself and her three-year-old daughter Franny. Jean is April's landlady and Franny's babysitter, a widow who shares her house more for the company than the extra income. She is also prone to panic attacks and may be a hypochondriac, an alcoholic or both. On the night in question, Jean is hospitalized and can't watch Franny. April reluctantly takes Franny to work, leaving her in a closed office while she goes to dance for customers. One of the clients is Bassam, a Muslim who pays extravagantly. Bassam berates April as immoral even as he lusts after her, and he keeps her from checking on her daughter. (Later his subplot has the most trouble meshing with the others.)Another customer is AJ, separated from the wife he has beaten and the son he loves, and now bounced from the club for getting too physical with one of the dancers. As their fates become inexorably intertwined, Dubus does a masterful job of allowing the reader to understand, if not forgive, why each character does what he or she does. In the process, he explores intricacies of faith and fate, love in its many dimensions (from maternal to sexual), the transactions through which men and women exert power over each other and the culture that shapes the characters and destinies of these individuals. Difficult to put down, impossible to forget. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The babysitter is sick, so April brings her three-year-old daughter to work-at the Puma Club for Men, where April strips. With a 12-city tour; reading group guide. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

ON the first page of "The Garden of Last Days," a young stripper named April drives her car to work with a scalding hot cup of coffee between her legs. Even if she weren't about to bare her thighs, along with everything else, this wouldn't seem to be a great idea. But it's all too indicative of how her night is going to go - and of April's judgment, or lack thereof. She's also a single mother who has strapped her 3-year-old daughter into the car to take her to work. Within a couple of pages, April pulls a U-turn, with predictable results for her thighs. At about the same time that April is burning herself, a young Saudi named Mansoor Bassam al-Jizani is driving toward the Puma Club, her place of employment, with an envelope containing 160 hundred-dollar bills on the seat beside him. He has decided to "go into the evil place one last time where he will appear harmless." This sentiment, along with such predictions as "Soon this will change, Allah willing" and lots of carping about "whores" and "kafir" (infidels), is the verbal equivalent of April's cup of coffee, or Chekhov's loaded gun. Even those who never heard about the penchant of some of the 9/11 hijackers for strip clubs will probably find themselves engaged in some pretty serious racial profiling. Very few readers will be unaware that "The Garden of Last Days" is the follow-up to "House of Sand and Fog," Andre Dubus Ill's critically acclaimed best seller, which was an Oprah Book Club selection and the basis for a 2003 movie starring Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley. In that novel, a recovering drug addict named Kathy Nicolo loses, through a bureaucratic error, the house she inherited from her father; the house is subsquently sold at auction to a former Iranian Army colonel, Massoud Amir Behrani, who is struggling for his little slice of the American pie. Dubus masterly orchestrated the inexorable collision of these two, humanizing both even as he made their stories seem as preordained as Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon. "The Garden of Last Days" makes use of a similar strangers-on-a-collision-course structure, but the new novel unreels in slow motion, and ultimately April's encounter with Bassam is nothing more than a glancing footnote to the terrible collision that reverberated around the world. The main action of the book takes place a few days before Sept. 11. Dubus changes the names of the hijackers but otherwise closely follows what is known about the last days of the cell based in Florida that eventually hijacked one of the flights from Boston. He tells his story in a limited third-person narrative that verges on first person, alternating between the main characters - including Lonnie, a bouncer, and A.J., a patron of the strip club. Perhaps inevitably, Bassam, the terrorist, is the least successful of these characters. Dubus has done his research, but he also wears it on his sleeve, and for all the Arabic words and phrases he deploys Bassam seems to be the stereotypical resentful, sexually frustrated fanatic with a giant inferiority complex vis-à-vis the infidels. "You looked at their ... backsides, you heard their talk and their laughter and you watched them walk in their high shoes, and surely this was the first of many temptations from Shaytan himself. But you were steadfast." Dubus's attempts to render Bassam's stream of consciousness in a kind of Arabic-inflected English frequently result in unintentional comedy. "This dancing woman upon the stage wears nothing but the hat of cowboys." "This David Lee Roth, if there was time Bassam would find him and kill him." What Bassam shares with his American counterparts is a sense of victimhood; all seem like hapless pawns. April feels vicitimized by her stoner ex-husband, her mother and the strip club boss. No one has a bigger chip on his shoulder than A.J., a heavy-equipment operator who feels misunderstood by his boss, his wife and the stripper whom he obsessively visits at the Puma Club. A.J. dreams of living in the Everglades with his son, "the two of them swinging in a hammock behind mosquito netting, eating roasted gator and bobcat and manatee. Lounge around like naked warriors. And no women." In the meantime, A. J. is visiting the club on the night in question. Unhappy that the object of his affections won't see him after work, A.J. makes the mistake of touching her arm - a violation of club rules. One of the bouncers is instantly upon him, breaking his wrist before ejecting him. After buying a pint of Wild Turkey ("That and his F-150 were his only companions tonight, the only ones he could count on"), the enraged and intoxicated A.J. returns to the club to exact some kind of revenge and ends up discovering April's 3-year-old daughter unattended in a back room. His first instinct is to protect her. Next thing he knows, he's got the girl in the back of his pickup. At some point his brain engages with reality long enough to realize that no one is going to believe he was just trying to help. While A.J. is carrying off her daughter, April is dancing in the V.I.P. room for Bassam. If April's motives are transparent, Bassam's are only slightly less so. He wants what he's not supposed to want and convinces himself that it doesn't count with an infidel. (Later, the night before the hijacking, he and his friend hire a hooker.) He wants to know April's real name, but he also wants to humiliate her. Like A.J., Bassam fears and resents the power of women. DUBUS certainly tries to make April a sympathetic figure, but for all the time we spend inside her head, watching her preparing for her shift and following her through her night and the early morning hours, she remains a generic figure - a mother, a beauty, an unloved daughter. The rich specificity of the prose in Dubus's previous novel is seldom on display. In fact, the writing here frequently degenerates into cliché. "Her nipples stiffened and she felt strange; she felt shy. She felt naked." Reading this, it's hard to suppress the urge to yell - she is naked. Yes, I know, he means emotionally naked. I just wish he hadn't felt obliged to tell me. Her grief and guilt when she discovers her child missing are plausible and moving, but Franny is discovered unharmed the next day, almost before April has had time to register the event. After all the foreshadowing and the omens, after the meticulously chronicled minutiae of April's working environment and A.J.'s unhappy marriage, the resolution of the abduction seems anticlimactic. It's as if in trying to develop the two story lines Bassam's and A.J.'s - Dubus can't quite commit fully to either. April's encounter with Bassam ultimately has no great resonance in her life. When she hears the news a few days after her encounter with Bassam, April is as shocked and baffled by-the events of 9/11 as any of us. She quits stripping, but her close encounter with one of the terrorists seems finally random and meaningless. Journalism needs only to tell us what happened; fiction, which deals in hypotheticals, has a higher threshold of truth. The hijacker wants what he's not supposed to want, and convinces himself it doesn't count with an infidel. Jay McInerney is the author of seven novels, including "Bright Lights, Big City" and "The Good Life." "How It Ended," a story collection, will be published in January.

Dubus's ambitious if uneven follow-up to House of Sand and Fog begins shortly before 9/11 with stripper April taking her three-year-old daughter, Franny, to work after the babysitter flakes at the last minute. Though she leaves Franny with the club's house mother and intends to keep tabs on her, April's distracted on the floor by Bassam, a Muslim who's in Florida to take flying lessons and (like one of the real 9/11 hijackers) spends early September 2001 throwing around money and living lasciviously. Meanwhile, AJ, a down-on-his-luck local, lingers in the parking lot after getting thrown out for touching a dancer. The slow-starting plot splinters once Franny wanders outside and disappears. Soon, AJ's wanted for kidnapping, April's run through the social service wringers as an unfit parent, and the murky particulars of Bassam's mission come into sharp focus as he struggles with his religious convictions. Dubus gives the breath of life to most of his characters (Bassam--not so much), though the narrative has a mechanical feeling, partially owing to the narrow emotional register Dubus works in: doom and desperation are in plentiful supply from page one, and as the novel fades to black, the reader's left with a roster of sadder-but-wiser Americans to contemplate. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved