The opening chapters are listless and list-like, outlining dietary habits and lifts to the airport. Out of this obstinate ennui, Holleran renders an elegiac and very funny contemplation of not just ageing but an age. Andrew Holleran’s first novel in 16 years, The Kingdom of Sand is about death and taxes, literally, plus solitaire, car repairs and five-hour-long porn searches in the late Obama era. The man has stayed on in his dead parents’ house with their ashes and, like a pharaoh’s tomb, their stuff: his mother’s perfumes, a pack of Pall Malls his father left in the fridge, a crystal Virgin Mary. The lake has gone dry, becoming prairie land. It’s a place of few residents, but 27 churches. The Kingdom of Sand is an audiobook that will burnish his considerable reputation: a reverie to sex but also a stunningly honest exploration of loneliness and the endless need for human connection, especially as we count down our days.Ī Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.I could no longer deny what I was: an old man who liked to pee in his flower bed.” So says an unnamed sixtysomething living alone in an unnamed North Florida town.

His following works have established him as one of the great writers of our time. Holleran's groundbreaking first novel, Dancer from the Dance, is widely regarded as a classic work of gay literature. In prose that's in turn mordantly funny and hauntingly elegiac, Andrew Holleran takes the listener from a video porn shop off Route 301 to the memory of parties in Washington, DC, filled with handsome young men, to the lonely facades of rural Florida. Semi-anonymous sexual encounters, gallows humor, and classic films are his tools for staving off the dying of the light.

Now he must witness the slow demise of a friend just a shade older than he is.

The Kingdom of Sand features a nameless narrator who has survived the death of his friends to AIDS and the loss of his parents to old age and tragedy. This program is read by award-winning actor and two-time Tony Award–nominee David Pittu.Īndrew Holleran's unique literary voice is on full display in this poignant story of lust, dread, and desire-the first novel in thirteen years from one of the most acclaimed gay authors of our time.

The Kingdom of Sand by Andrew Holleran