“If you're going out with Andre, don't plan on being home before dawn,” Bill Rusin, Norton's head of sales tells me. I'm intrigued. Anticipation for Dubus III's new novel, The Garden of Last Days, is running high. I've seen Dubus in action, at the prepublication lunch in New York City: he's movie-star handsome, his charm in front of the crowd so palpable it's almost suspect.

Dubus's new book, Garden—coming this June nine years after his megahit, House of Sand and Fog (over two million copies and still selling), a 1999 National Book award finalist and Oprah pick—is about 9/11, not the actual event, but the days leading up to it. Having read that the terrorists visited a men's club in Florida, Dubus imagines an intriguing set of characters and spins their stories: Bassam, the conflicted Saudi Arabian hijacker, and April, the dancer he becomes obsessed with, a young woman who sees her job as a means to a legitimate life for herself and her three-year-old daughter. Add to the mix another Puma Club regular, A.J., an angry, lonely working guy, whose deluded attempt to do a good deed leads to the chaos and disaster and clash of wills that is signature Dubus.

Dubus, 48, lives in Newburyport, Mass., an old shipbuilding town, gentrified now, but Dubus predates the prettiness, and anyway, he lives outside of town in the country, with his wife, Fontaine, a dancer (who has sewn cushions in lean times to make ends meet) and their three kids. He's been married close to 20 years and his in-laws live downstairs in the house he built himself, having worked as a carpenter through those lean times. He picks me up in Boston in his big ole Toyota truck, and now I think he doesn't look like a movie star but one of those handsome blue-collar mill-town boys you see all over New England, and the charm up close is as authentic and seductive as the worn cowboy boots that he tells me are from 1978.

The son of Andre Dubus, the celebrated short story writer, Dubus III never thought he'd become a writer. Despite a checkered academic career, he got a degree in sociology from UT Austin and was in a Ph.D. program at the University of Wisconsin when he gave up academia to train as a boxer, work as a prison counselor, an actor, a private investigator, a bounty hunter and a bartender, bouncing from Colorado to New York to Texas and back to Massachusetts, more often than not in the wake of a girlfriend. Being the son of a famous writer had its advantages and disadvantages. It was a girlfriend in one of his father's writing classes whose crush on a classmate made him jealous enough to try writing a story. “It was a terrible story,” he says, “but I was hooked.” On the other hand, when his first published story in Playboy, about a guy who goes on a date after seven years in prison, won a national magazine award in 1985, it was his father who got the call and had to explain that his son had written the story.

Dubus's first book, The Cage Keeper and Other Stories (Dutton, 1989) was rejected by 30 publishers; for his first novel, Bluesman (Faber & Faber, 1993), the advance was smaller than for the collection; and for House of Sand and Fog the advance was $15,000. He was thrilled. “I thought I'd never see this much money again.” He can tell you about the seeds that led him to write House of Sand and Fog (an Iranian girlfriend in college, an Iranian roommate in Texas, a newspaper clipping he brought to his fiction class to inspire his students), but he says, “I never feel like I have a story to tell. I write to find the story.”

He started thinking about 9/11, about how the hijackers, while fanatically fundamentalist, spent their last days drinking in strip clubs. He interviewed a local woman who worked in a club, flew down to Florida to see what these clubs were like. He read the Qur'an. But mostly he speculated, and five and a half years later he had his novel. He says he's haunted by everything he's ever written and quotes Beckett: “Try again. Fail better.”

Over dinner in Cambridge at the John Harvard Brew house, Dubus is as intense as his characters. He engages our pierced, tattooed waiter, who tells us he's a drummer. Dubus tells him that his son plays the drums. We drink beer and vodka. Seven hours later, there's a ticket on the windshield of the truck. Not quite dawn, but I'm not disappointed. Does staying up till daylight to get to the end of a Dubus novel count?