The Kingdom of Sand

by Andrew Holleran

Out in the drought-struck backwaters of rural Florida, The Kingdom of Sand's nameless narrator lives a life of semi-solitude, enjoying the odd, fleeting sexual encounter and the friendship of a few.

His world is ageing, and the memories of another time flash, then fade - visions of parties filled with handsome young men, the parents whom he chose to spend his life besides, the generation he once knew, struck down by AIDS. But, when forced to watch the slow demise of a close neighbour, he is drawn back to the here and now, and his own borrowed time in this kingdom of sand.

An elegy to sex and the body, but also a tragically honest exploration of loneliness and the endless need for human connection, The Kingdom of Sand marks the much-anticipated return of Andrew Holleran.

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Gay, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Novels

260 pages, Hardcover

First published June 7, 2022

About the author

Born in 1943. Andrew Holleran is the pseudonym of Eric Garber, a novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is a prominent novelist of post-Stonewall gay literature. He was a member of The Violet Quill, a gay writer's group that met briefly from 1980-81.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The near-universal praise for this book is deserved. Andrew Holleran has been quietly chronicling American gay life for more than 40 years. While Dancer from the Dance will likely remain his best known work, his latest may in fact be his best. Set in rural northern Florida, the theme is loneliness: and specifically an aging gay man's fear of dying alone. Although billed as a novel, it reads as a collection of related stories, repeating at times several key events and revolving around the narrator's friendship with the older Earl, beautifully told in the novella-like chapter Hurricane Weather. In terms of style, there is nothing innovative here. Instead, it is a perfect refinement of Holleran's own approach - a memoir with just enough fiction to elide that label. This can be a depressing read and some readers are understandably left cold. It's true, as some have pointed out, that the narrator perhaps typifies a certain breed of middle-class white gay man, allowed to approach old age on his own terms. There may be some symbolism with that character, an alter ego for the author, fading into obscurity in deep red Florida. After revisiting the book over the past week, I can see this isn't one I'm likely to pick up again even if it is a book I'm not likely to forget. Yet for all its challenges, there is a realness to this writing that makes everything else I've read this year feel like artifice.

[Jaidee · Rating 1 out of 5]

1 "just can't do it, soul sucking, woe is he" star !!!

Thank you to Netgalley and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux for an ecopy. This was released June 2022 and I am providing an honest review.

This review is only for the first 20 percent of the book as I could just not move further in.

The one star is for the moderately good literary prose.

I do not have the fortitude to read about the observations and complaints of a self-pitying, self-absorbed, gay, voguish depressive gentleman. Sorry not sorry !

I acknowledge that by stopping at 20 percent I may be missing a minor masterpiece. I will take that chance.

This might be more palatable to me as three tracks on a Morrissey album.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loneliness can happen at any age…in any part of the world….
…..unbearable emptiness, fear of social anxiety, depression, crying easily, with aching feelings of going unnoticed.

In “The Kingdom of Sand”…..Andrew Holleran examines these feelings through a Gay,middle-age man.
The nameless narrator (NN), has never been married, is childless, has had hookups, boyfriends, other gay close friends, but lives alone.

NN has aged out of the youthful bar scene —
…..loneliness has become his common companion — along with gay porn.
As a gay man, NN is obsessed with the way he looks - how other people look - (compares his body, and sexual magnetism against his close friends).
He is obsessed with what he eats - and notices what other people eat.
“I was a sucker for the list of foods that supposedly increased longevity (Swiss chard, mustard greens, blueberries, and still decades later after Adelle Davis, those old standbys, sardines). I believed somehow in the absurd idea that if you ate right you could live indefinitely. Even when, a decade after my mother‘s death, I began getting skin cancers, all I could think of was: how could this be. Given all the broccoli I’ve eaten? It must be loneliness, I concluded, the lack of a person to live for other than myself, since we are also told that health is psychosomatic. Meanwhile the little boxes of tea taken from the gift basket a woman had sent after my mothers death sat in the cupboard along with my father‘s bottles of scotch, and in the cheese box in the refrigerator the little triangles of Boursin from the same funeral present, which I would not permit myself to eat, and in the freezer my fathers last carton of Breyers vanilla ice cream, turned yellow as hard as stone”.

This is one of those rare adult novels that deals tenderly and honestly with adult life — most predominantly the single aging gay man— (we meet his friends, his community, learn about his parents, their illnesses, medical handicaps, and deaths, his dirty-feelings of shame, small town realities, sexual distractions, and sexual/relationship desires)….
but….
…..*anyone* who’s going to die,
…..lives in Florida,
…..or has ever spent time in Florida,
…..has ever had skin cancer,
…..tries to eat healthy,
…..is middle age, (any gender, race, or sexual identity),
…..have had parents who have died,
…..lives alone,
…..feels lonely, fearful of aging alone, sad, old, wrinkly, and squishy,
…..has ever felt dirty from buying a porn video from the video store,
…..has wondered if assisted living is a place for you,
…..has started thinking your next event: death,
…..has been actively present with a loved-one from decline to death,
…..can remember the year 1961,
…..remembers drive-in movie theaters,
…..has felt nervous to go home for Christmas,
…..have accumulated things that you can’t bear to part with before you die…..
etc. etc. etc.
…..and enjoys quiet novels that often moved you more than action driven books do,
…..will get value from this book!

There is no giant plot…(on the surface it’s a simple story)…but dig a little deeper, and it’s likely to have a more labyrinthian feeling…..an awakening to all the million of things that make up our lives.
……a beach would not be as beautiful if each grain of sand did not have its own place…..

I was instantly drawn into the gorgeous writing. The characters are so seriously real to me.

The setting is spot on exquisite…..fitting perfectly with this story.
“The town to which Earl and my father retired was not one of those artificial communities created for people in the last stage of life with which Florida is associated. But it had its share of the elderly. It was good to be reminded by the Regular of another stage of life, especially when I stopped off at the post office on my way home from his shack. The people moving slowly toward the post office on walkers when I went to get the mail induced both pity and admiration; pity for their condition, admiration for their determination to keep going”.

I ached ….. for the loneliness of NN ….for his desires not met….his fear of dying alone.

I savored the prose…the quietness and intimacy felt. The contemplation of living, loving, and dying.

I laughed…..(oh there is wonderful organic laughs….funny bone treasures!)….
….. that gave the topics of aging, Gay-aging, dying, loss of youthfulness, worries of no longer being sexually desired, grief…..etc….a transcendently humanitarian beauty that took my breath away.

5 strong stars …I loved it!

Thank you Netgalley, Farra, Straus, and Giroux, and Andrew Holleran

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Church believes in the Resurrection, and at the Resurrection the body and soul are united. What age the body is, and exactly how the two are rejoined , I don’t know; when I asked my friend, he said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that one.”

You know when a book comes out of left field and reading it ends up being such an emotional wallop? I received ‘The Kingdom of Sand’ as a Netgalley arc and promptly forgot about it until I checked my bookshelf and realised I had only a week in which to finish it. Luckily for me it is under 300 pages, and also a book hard to put down once you start it.

Holleran, of course, is author of the classic ‘Dancer from the Dance’ (1978), and this apparently is his first novel in nearly two decades. How on earth do you follow up such a seminal work so far down the line, especially as a shining star of The Violet Quill writers’ group in the 1980s (Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund, George Whitmore).

Now aged 79, Holleran tackles what is perhaps one of the most ignored topics in contemporary gay literature: Getting old and sick, and dying alone. The situation is doubly compounded if you are gay, especially if you lost a partner to Aids or simply natural attrition, or never ever found ‘the one’. A lot of gay people are also estranged from their families, who disapprove of their ‘lifestyle choices’, while gay friends of a similar age (and outlook) are few and far between. As Holleran says, who on earth do you call when you need to go for that colonoscopy?

If all of this seems depressing and offputting, fear not. You will be amazed at our unnamed narrator’s sexual appetite (and stamina) deep into his sixties, and his cruising habits in the small town in which he has chosen to settle (and eventually pass away in). The book is deeply funny, tender, humane, and surprisingly unsentimental. Holleran’s glorious writing – long, lingering sentences, even longer chapters, and a painter’s eye for detail and effect – hums with the vibrancy of life and passion.

At the core of the book is the unnamed narrator’s ‘relationship’ with Earl, who at two decades older is about to begin the path of inexorable decline that we must all undertake in the end. It is a quiet story, filled with wonder and pathos, and unflinching about the terrible toll that age can exact.

It is no spoiler to reveal that Earl does finally succumb to what Henry James called “the great, the distinguished thing.” He does so quietly in the middle of a paragraph, as discreetly as he had lived his entire life. There follows an incredible passage where we find the unnamed narrator sitting at home watching the teeming animal and insect life in his unkempt garden, thinking of his just departed friend, and what a precious gift life is in the end, simply due to it being bestowed upon us so arbitrarily and briefly.

When the American novelist Howard Sturgis lay on his deathbed he was cared for so solicitously by his life partner that at one point Sturgis had to remind him, “A watched pot never boils” – surely one of the wittiest comments ever made while dying, unless you consider what the socialite Drue Heinz said when nearing the end – “They won’t even let you take a book” – or the emperor Vespasian, who remarked on his deathbed, “I think I am turning into a god.”

[Alexis Hall]

Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: none
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.

Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. This is complete nonsense. Firstly, writing isn’t a competitive sport. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if they’re glowing. And finally: taking time out of my life to read an entire book, then write a detailed review about it that a handful of people on GR will look at would be a profoundly inefficient and ineffective way to damage the careers of other authors. If you can’t credit me with simply being a person who loves books and likes talking about them, at least credit me with enough common sense to be a better villain.

*******************************************

I finally managed to make myself read this due to a “read the bottom book in your NG queue” pact I made with Ellie on Twitter.

I … I honestly don’t know what to say.

This is a beautifully written, depressing as hell book about being a white gay dude getting old in Florida. My favourite extant review of it pans it for being a poor portrayal of Florida. It’s kinda … something I guess … that all these white gay dudes who wrote about being young and beautiful in the 70s are now writing about being old and under-laid in the 2020s. The Kingdom of Sand, in particular, offers a weird, melancholic but oddly inevitable-feeling bookend to The Dancer from the Dance.

There’s no real plot here to speak of. The unnamed narrator, in his early sixties, is living his parents' old house in Florida. Here he meditates in a sort of thematic haze about his life and contemplates his future, while his friend, another gay man living alone, some twenty years older than the narrator, gradually dies.

Death and loneliness (and Florida) are the main connectors here: I don't necessarily include queerness because the death and loneliness have a universal quality to them, and the queerness is very specific to a particular of American white gay man. Props, though, for taking on some legitimately terrifying shit about mortality and vulnerability, the loss of desirability and place in the world. It’s really hard to know what to say about the book because … my mind sort of recoils from thinking about any of this, when… y’know, maybe it should? Or not?

I can admire, in abstract, the technical facility of this book: the way something that feels so formless is clearly so tightly controlled, the precision of the detail whether it’s talking about character, or bodies, or the changing landscapes of Florida, the crispness of the language (which is even kind of bleakly funny sometimes, “The only difference between [my father and I] was that he had played solitaire and I was watching people have sex: a generational decline, I suppose.”)

But the truth is, I kind of … ended up getting very little from this book on a personal level. I think perhaps because I didn’t want to. I think I’m just not ready for this book: not quite young enough for it to feel irrelevant to me yet old enough to fear the almighty shit out everything it speaks of. Even if its conclusion is not wholly hopeless and my own plan for my twilight years is to selfishly pre-decease my partner.

[Constantine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ ½
Genre: Literary Fiction + LGBTQIA

The Kingdom of Sand is the story of loneliness, isolation, and the feeling of not belonging whether it is to the family, friends, or society. The book is narrated in first-person style. Our narrator is a nameless person. He is a single aging gay man who lives in Florida. Through his narration, the reader gets to know his relationship with his parents, sister, close gay friends, and also his adventures and hookups in this small town.

Although there is no specific plot in this story, the narrator’s words flow like sand’s movement on a windy day. It is a beautifully written book that tackles many subjects important to any person regardless of his sexuality like getting old alone, illness, and the death of a relative or friend. It deals with the sense of feeling lonely even when you are surrounded by others.

I was not a fan of the first few pages of the book. That is not the fault of the story. I usually do not care much about knowing or understanding the setting and locations in contemporary stories. So if you are like me, do not quit. Continue reading because you will be immersed in the protagonist’s narration.

The book has some dialogue between characters but the main focus here is the main character’s narration. We as readers are following his words, living in this town through his eyes, and experiencing all the different emotions he is going through. Whether those emotions are grief, sadness, lust, or plain loneliness that he has accepted over the years. Sometimes he makes you feel that his closest friend in his world is that loneliness! He is so used and comfortable with it that he doesn’t feel like going to his sister’s on the Eve of Christmas despite loving her. He’d rather be by himself in his lonely world.

What fascinates me about such stories is how they feel relatable. The reasons could be different from one person to another but the concept is the same. The pain is the same. The protagonist here is a homosexual and the probability of leading a lonely life for people from the LGBTQ community could be more than the others because still not everybody is living and has the same chances as others.

I love the book’s cover and title. I have my own interpretation of why the author might have chosen this title. To me, the kingdom represents the protagonist’s life. It is a kingdom of loneliness. It is fragile and made of sand in reference to the main character’s aging and uncertain future. The wind will eventually move all that sand away, scattering it all over the place and then one day it is all gone when the end comes. Loved it.

Many thanks to the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for providing me with an advance reader copy of this book.

[Erik · Rating 2 out of 5]

In The Kingdom of Sand Andrew Holleran returns to the literary world (after a 13-year hiatus) in a rambling, stream-of-consciousness writing that left me underwhelmed.

The protagonist in The Kingdom of Sand is someone past readers of Holleran will be familiar with: a gay man, formerly a resident of New York City, who now calls North Florida his home. Except now the protagonist is in his twilight years, a 60-year-old man living in his dead parents' home. This home remains a sanctuary to the dead with not even the figurines his mother used to display moved or sold or boxed away despite her death years prior. As an elderly gay man in North Florida, the protagonist befriends Earl, an even older man he meets at the one local cruising spot in the area. Over the course of the book, our protagonist wrestles with his own feelings of loneliness, aging, and death while watching one of his only queer community die.

The Kingdom of Sand is an important book for what it does: it tells the story of a gay man in his old age, living outside a major metropolitan area. This story is rare for so many reasons, foremost because so many queer men died during the AIDS crisis that so few have lived to experiencing old age as a gay man. And for this reason, I wanted this book - and Andrew Holleran himself - to be a success. But it was not. Holleran writes with a pure stream-of-consciousness, without editing or removing redundant or irrelevant points. At numerous points, Holleran redescribes - in the same detail - scenes he has described before creating unnecessary redundancy. This book's style was not for me, but maybe it will be for you.

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about being old, gay and lonely. The tone is so casual that it takes some time to notice how depressing this is.

[Reading_ Tamishly · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's the writing that kept me wanting for more from the story as well as from the characters.

I wonder how the best authors do it but it's rare for me to find the exact emotions in the writing that reflects the plot of the story perfectly. This is one of those books.

It's heartbreaking. It's really sad and quiet like I was drowning in my own solitude while I was reading it.

The characters feel so real. It feels like I was reading a personal diary of someone who's baring their soul to someone they trust.

This book has the capacity to make you feel alone the whole time; make you go so aware of your own feelings that it's just impossible not to think about the unnecessary things we give so much importance to while we choose to neglect the small things that would matter ultimately.

It's one of those books which make you reflect on your life, the people you care about and the times when these people would no longer be around you.

I cannot wait for the book to come out.


Thank you, Farrar Straus and Giroux and the author, for the advance reading copy.

[Jodi · Rating 3 out of 5]

An OK-enough read, but it was quite depressing and boring. There were a few odd interesting bits, though.

So here’s the thing… I’m in my mid-sixties, I lead a fairly solitary, sedentary life and, more and more, I find myself dwelling on what’s next in this life (despite knowing it’ll be up to me). So I started the book—though I’m neither gay nor male—thinking I’d relate well to this protagonist and that I’d, hopefully, pick up a few of his “life lessons” and maybe learn from the light I assumed he’d find at the end of the tunnel. Sadly, though, he found no such light, and there were no life lessons.😕 And there were no fireworks. It did not end with a bang. It was more a “fade to black” scene.

3.5 rounded to 3 😢“Life’s-a-Bitch-and-then-you-Die” stars ⭐⭐⭐

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

LONGLISTED for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction!

The Publisher Says: One of the great appeals of Florida has always been the sense that the minute you get here you have permission to collapse.

The Kingdom of Sand is a poignant tale of desire and dread—Andrew Holleran’s first new book in sixteen years. The nameless narrator is a gay man who moved to Florida to look after his aging parents—during the height of the AIDS epidemic—and has found himself unable to leave after their deaths. With gallows humor, he chronicles the indignities of growing old in a small town.

At the heart of the novel is the story of his friendship with Earl, whom he met cruising at the local boat ramp. For the last twenty years, he has been visiting Earl to watch classic films together and critique the neighbors. Earl is the only person in town with whom he can truly be himself. Now Earl’s health is failing, and our increasingly misanthropic narrator must contend with the fact that once Earl dies, he will be completely alone. He distracts himself with sexual encounters at the video porn store and visits to Walgreens. All the while, he shares reflections on illness and death that are at once funny and heartbreaking.

Holleran’s first novel, Dancer from the Dance, is widely regarded as a classic work of gay literature. The Kingdom of Sand displays all of Holleran’s considerable gifts; it’s an elegy to sex and a stunningly honest exploration of loneliness and the endless need for human connection, especially as we count down our days.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm getting older. No, let's not be American about it: I'm old. Stories are very comforting when they tell you about yourself as you'd like to be. They're less comforting when they hold a mirror to ourselves as we are.
This isn't a comforting story for me to read.

Dancer from the Dance was the roadmap for how I wanted to be in the 1970s: Rooms full of men fucking each other's brains out? Parties with mind-altering substances galore?! Sign me up! I'm ready to start this kind of life! This book, not so much.

Mostly because illness, isolation, and the slightly tedious repetitiveness of sex are my reality, and aren't very interesting to me unless they're freshly observed. Let's be honest, what's ever going to make this stuff fresh to those within it? It is not, as far as I can see, possible to make excitement and anticipation from the routine, mundane, quotidian life of Getting Old. Bearing in mind as I do daily that getting old is a privilege denied to most people, it is a curiously samey process. I'm aware that there are people aging vigorously and pursuing, in their seventies, activity levels I never attained. I'm also aware that I am stunningly lucky not to be dead or permanently cognitively impaired after January 2023's strokes. I don't mean there's only one way to get old: I mean getting old, no matter which way you slice it, has certain common themes that don't rev my readerly engine above idle speed.

I looked over what I've just written, thought "this doesn't sound like a four-star review," and called my Young Gentleman Caller to read it to him. Thank goodness I did! After A Long Silence, he finally said, "Tedious repetitiveness? Thanks a lot." Explaining to him what I actually meant, aside from reassuring his bruised feelings about my real opinion of his prowess, clarified the subject that's bothered me about the book since I read it.

Holleran's over a decade older than I am. As I read about the life he was describing, I thought about the sameness of the unnamed PoV character's life as repetitive, even...perhaps especially...his unchanged relationship to sex. The expectation of desire for the same kind of sex into one's older age isn't a sign of vigor to me, but a sign of arrested adolescence. The concerns about isolation, in that context, also read as adolesent fears of not being Hot, of never finding friends/boyfriends/partners when it feels like everyone around you has them, in general of FOMO.

Seriously? You're still on about this? is what I'd say to this guy if I met him. I don't want an orgy or a three-way anymore, I want to spend that hour and a half in the more rewarding, interesting leisurely touching, stroking, and communing with Rob, the man I know and want to know better. That's a whole different experience from cruising the porn store as does our aging Casanova. Part of that is, again, down to my good luck. There is someone in my life who elicits these feelings from me, and is willing to reciprocate them. That's what I thought Earl meant to our PoV character, whose lack of a name feels to me like a reinforcement of this guy's utter and complete adolescent narcissism. "Only I am Real, everyone else is an extra in the movie of my life." And this is in spite of the fact that PoVman is basically spending the whole of his time in this book narrating Earl's decline and fall into the Endless!

Oh dear, again I'm veering into the not-highly-rating territory.

This is why I've had such trouble reviewing the book. It's a much better literary experience than I'm making it sound like. Look at the thoughts it's causing me to examine! Look at the depth of attention it summons out of me! I'm having interesting, important conversations with my Young Gentleman Caller because I need his help to process my feelings about the read.

Author Holleran is a fine wordsmith, with an opera librettist's ear for sentences that sing in my ear:

I believed somehow in the absurd idea that if you ate right you could live indefinitely. Even when, a decade after my mother‘s death, I began getting skin cancers, all I could think of was: how could this be? Given all the broccoli I’ve eaten? It must be loneliness, I concluded, the lack of a person to live for other than myself, since we are also told that health is psychosomatic.
–and–
The town to which Earl and my father retired was not one of those artificial communities created for people in the last stage of life with which Florida is associated. But it had its share of the elderly. It was good to be reminded by the Regular of another stage of life, especially when I stopped off at the post office on my way home from his shack. The people moving slowly toward the post office on walkers when I went to get the mail induced both pity and admiration; pity for their condition, admiration for their determination to keep going.
–and–
The Church believes in the Resurrection, and at the Resurrection the body and soul are united. What age the body is, and exactly how the two are rejoined , I don’t know; when I asked my friend, he said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that one.”

There's a lot of this kind of thoughtful, careful observation in the book. Given the gargantuan tragedy and Black-Death-level reaping of the men in his generation's cohort, observing is safer than involving. The porn store isn't a casual or haphazard choice for the narrator's sex life. The reporting of life is safer than the living of it:

One of the great appeals of Florida has always been the sense that the minute you get here you have permission to collapse.
–and–
Leaving Florida, nevertheless, I always felt regret; though when I found myself back in New York my mother's voice on the telephone seemed so shrunken and small, I vowed that I would never waste time in that town again. How could I? I was not responsible for her happiness; she wanted me to live, and life was wasted every day I was there. Look how the noiseless spider, the relentless metronome, the secret thief, had staked their claim on even these two people, these once glamorous parents who had turned into a pair of country mice.
–and–
Florida was where they lived, where I kept coming back, though nobody asked me questions anymore about what I was doing. One day, when I was sitting in the back seat of the car as we were waiting for a railroad train to go by on our way to the mall, my mother turned back to me and said, apropos of something I forget, "You are a separate person, you know," but I felt I wasn't. I couldn't get away from them, which is why I kept coming back to Florida.
–and–
I see in the distance on streets I don’t usually take, merely because I can see the glow of blue and green lights, the two most satisfying Christmas colors, no doubt because they are so melancholy.

I didn't find my life changed by this book but I did find in it much to interrogate, about myself, my present, my past; and that's a very rare thing for a book to do in a world of escapism and avoidance of the depths of experience. That Author Holleran did this while using surfaces and appearances and absences made it impressive to me on a literary level while keeping me at a greater distance from PoVman's life than I'd require to give the book my highest accolades.

Make no mistake, this is a good book. It's not great, but it's good, and I hope you'll read it one day soon.

Maybe borrow it from the library, though.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being gay and alone, growing old alone, dying alone. That is what this book is about. Three things that scare me the most making this book book one of the great horror stories of the 21st centaury. Even though the unnamed 60 something narrator is certainly not alone, we join him as his life simply starts to fall away; friends dying, neighbours moving, health failing and simply losing interest etc.

Won't lie, a tad depressing but also funny and moving. I preferred this to The Beauty of Men, it's set in the same place, and in a way could be easily be a sequel and I had to check if Earl was in both books but it was Eric in the Beauty of Men.

If you are a gay man of a certain age you will probably know someone like the narrator of this book, and if you do, let them know you are there if they need you. They probably won't thank you to your face but I think quietly they will be grateful.

[Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was not too sure about this book at first, even found myself judging the characters at times - but the book is so wise, so shrewd and timely and kind, and so raw, that I could not stop turning the pages. I wish it had never ended.

[Susie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded to 4.

[Phobos · Rating 1 out of 5]

As much as I hate to do this, Kingdom of Sand was a DNF for me. I made it 30% of the way through by telling myself it’ll pick up by this page, this percent, I’ve heard good things about this author, surely he doesn’t spend all of his freaking time in the Florida he finds so dull. Surely!

Right, so I was wrong about that. At that point I started heavily skimming chapters. If you count skimming I suppose I read the entire thing.

So what didn’t I like? Kingdom of Sand is slow paced in the way that a life is. Unfortunately that life belongs to someone who did semi-interesting things in their younger years and vaguely reminisces, but mostly just complains about the mundanity of their today. The visceral realism is impressive, but it’s also boring as hell. No, I absolutely don’t want to read a book about someone doing nothing but getting old and watching the people around them die.

This book is a hate letter to Florida. This isn’t Florida Man’s Florida (if you know you know), but instead the part of Florida where upper-middle class and above white people retire to. Not in any old regular neighborhood, but neighborhoods with fellow retirees. So everyone in this book is over 60, which isn’t a problem. The problem is that it’s so damn depressing with absolutely no payoff. At one point we get like 2 pages of a few lines per person of our main character detailing how the people on his parents' street either grew old and died or moved into an assisted living facility.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that this book wasn’t for me. I’m a nonbinary black millennial from the midwest. I can’t be the target demographic. There’s a lot of old school catty white gay behavior in this book- transphobia, light racism, misogyny. This isn't to say that those things aren't still hella prevalent because they definitely are, but it felt like a pretty vintage way to be shitty imo. All in all, I just really couldn’t find a reason to continue reading.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eARC.

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was very torn by this story. I found it interesting, that we never learn the narrator's name. I have thought quite a bit on this creative choice and I would love to know why the author chose this.

This story is universal, regardless of how anyone identifies. We all get older. Things change. Time goes by quicker than we imagine. Sometimes, dreams remain just that, dreams. Things we hoped for ourselves don't turn out that way. And death...we are all touched by death and eventually, we all meet death.

This story spoke to me on a very personal level. And as a gay man, I think it really speaks to what society projects on us and how we deal with that.
I found the story hard at times to read, not because the narrative was bad. Because it wasn't. It was rather excellent. It was tough to read because it's so incredibly honest and it's scary subject matter.
I had my reservations at first when I began but I quickly changed my opinion. I think it's a beautiful story and it's one we all are faced with sooner or later. I think we need more stories like this.

[Troy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book made me feel terrible. Like kudos if that was the feeling Holleran wanted to give me bc mission accomplished.

[Daniel Myatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A meandering experience that repeated itself over and over and over again!

Whilst I enjoyed the concept and the first 3rd of the book, I found myself bored of the constant repetition and also the whining of the narrator! I felt he needed to take control of his life and move on, he just bemoaned his fate constantly.

Nothing happens in this book, which might have been the point as nothing really happened in the narrators life either. Maybe I just missed the point.

Not terrible but not great!

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing was very engaging but the story got monotonous over time. Maybe that was intentional as the narrator’s live was monotonous.

Overall, this was a study of aging, death and isolation. It didn’t feel like it really had much to say in the long run.

[Sophy H · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh gosh, this book has me so conflicted.

I love it and I hate it and it has made my depressive thoughts worse.

Ok so let me try and break this down. I have to say, despite the painfully slow beginning with overly long and inflated sentences, the writing is absolutely beautiful. The observations on life are poetic, as are the descriptions of the state of Florida. I really got a sense of place from reading this.

This book is about ageing and dying and death, with a sprinkle of friendship and companionship thrown in to try and ease the pain (it doesn't). But ultimately it is melancholic. I felt like I was holding my breath while reading it, it made me so so sad. I just felt the inherent sadness of a person wasting their life, stuck in a time capsule of their own making, unloved in the sense of a soul mate or life partner, watching their platonic companion slowly deflate and disappear from life.

Throughout the story there is a lot of talk of elderly people needing to receive home care/going into nursing homes/dying by measures in nursing homes. This hit home for me particularly due to parental circumstances right now.

Although there were glimpses of contented moments for our main character, they felt shallow and short lived. All I kept picking up on was his anxiety, his overthinking and his worry (as I am the exact same). Maybe the book hit too many nerves for me and maybe it wasn't the right time. But I struggle to see that many people would pick this up and truly love it from start to finish.

I give it 3 stars as I recognise the beauty in the writing but it made me feel really shitty.

[Fraser Simons]

Maybe I’ll revisit this if it’s longlisted but boy I just don’t buy the authorial voice at all in this book. I gave it 35 pages and there’s a mix of sad desperation and a hint of funny, such as him being so lonely he starts humping a refrigerator. I cannot convey to how deeply unmoved I am by sexually frustrated protagonists. Coupled with the voice that just isn’t convincing, I think this is a pass. Why isn’t a one star? I think I’m not accepting the central conceits of the novel and if that’s the case it’s not necessarily the craft, or not purely that. Maybe another day. Maybe the audiobook; one day.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I learned last month that Andrew Holleran would be reading from his new book at my local bookstore in early June, I reread his 1978 Dancer from the Dance, narrated by a more or less invisible ghost. The two characters at the center of that novel were vivid if not particularly interesting, cartoons rather than characters. Holleran’s new book brings that narrator back at the other end of his life. The focus now turns to the restless ghost.

Listening to Holleran read from his book and answer easy questions was a bit of surprise: he is lively, animated, amusing with a sharp sense of humor. Impossible not to be charmed by the man. His new book on the other hand is a bit grim, even dismal. There’s not much of a story, it’s more an unfocused memoir of echoes and moods, a shimmer of reflections that morph back and forth like a loop of Philip Glass. For all his fame and success, there is a pervasive lament, a sense that somehow Life has been missed or was perhaps not even possible, that at best being gay is only a capricious way of being doomed. Even in Dancer, published when gay life was at its most utopian and exuberant, the aura of elegy predominates. In The Kingdom of Sand the ghost wanders the darkened streets of small town Florida, “house hunting” like a spectral Todd Hido, dropping into the home of a dying friend or a deserted Walgreens or hiking across the bed of a dried-up lake, forever tracing his circular thoughts into inextricable knots. The strange star of the book is the landscape of Florida itself, illuminated, evocative, exhausted and betrayed.

[Dennis Holland · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like ‘The Kingdom of Quicksand’ how it sucked me in and engulfed me.

[Joey Vich · Rating 2 out of 5]

Holy moly was this a chore. I mean, really.

Let me get the most egregious offense out of the way first : this is a dry book. I’ve never taken so long reading such a short novel. It’s written in a way that’s comparable to sitting in a freshly painted white room with no windows and no furniture. The author just drones on and on …and on about the most mundane, nonsensical things with little to no page breaks in between. I know that Andrew Holleran is revered for his novel “Dancer From The Dance” but I didn’t like that one much either - essentially for the same reasons as my gripes with this one. The anonymous protagonist of Kingdom of Sand ( that’s right folks , he couldn’t even be written interestingly enough to be given a name ) spends the bulk of the novel complaining about oh, this and that and this and that .
Why do I care about him ?? I did not. In fact , he was down right insufferable at times. He is what we in the gay community refer to as a “bitchy gay.” And folks, unfortunately because we do not live inside of a daytime sitcom , bitchy gay is not something that we should aspire to be. Those aren’t laugh tracks that you hear friend, they’re the silent groans of everyone around you.
Nameless protagonist will go on these long tangents about the gorgeous muscle boys at bath houses that he’s been to, and then a few pages later he will express how the “egg shaped men” would ruin it for everyone. He also, on a couple of separate occasions, will describe men as “plain looking” or “shaped like a bowling ball pin.” Sorry gays, if you have body fat or if you’re bald, you just aren’t that very interesting or attractive to write about , according to Andrew Holleran.
Perhaps it is just my Generation , perhaps we are in fact too sensitive. Perhaps I’m missing something in the sea of words on top of words on top of words that Holleran spits out onto the page. But at the end of the day, this book was intensely boring. And that in itself merits its rating from me.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Offhand I cannot think of many works of fiction that focus on aging from the perspective of the aging. Old people moving from their seventies and onward seem to dissolve from the public consciousness: they become increasing invisible and certainly not as profitable to publishers as stories of younger people. Andrew Holleran’s The Kingdom of Sand is a recent exception. As the book jacket says, “[w]ith gallows humor, he chronicles the indignities of growing old…”.

The narrator is gay and his aging includes an exploration of challenges that are probably unique to, particularly, many gay men. [Here I’m thinking of the impact that AIDS had on a generation.] But the thrust of the narrative lays bare many of the concerns, challenges and situations of the aging, straight or gay. The novel is a reminder of the commonalities that link ageing people regardless of their sexual orientation.

Halloran’s narration is only one perspective of the aging world. Stewart O’Nan’s Emily Alone offers a voice –in this case a widow’s—that serves as another insight into our declining years.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andrew Holleran is my favorite writer, and once again he delivers a book written in language that is gorgeous, but also efficient, spare and insightful. This book lacks much of a plot, which is why I didn’t love it as his other books. There’s a lot of descriptions of garages, Christmas trees and streets that don’t add up to much. His thoughts on gay men and gay culture and gay friendship are almost entirely wrapped up in issues of aging and death, and nobody writes about that as beautifully and as emotionally as he does.

[William Miles · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beautifully written.

Dreadfully dreary and wearisome.

[Sean Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that hits too close to home, being an old lonely gay man staring down the barrels of death myself ;)

[Michael Flick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quiet, lonely book, a gay man ages, lost to himself and the world. By choice, so it seems.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andrew Holleran’s The Kingdom of Sand presents one man’s entanglement with old age, both humorous and mournful in its final unraveling. Drawing on some of the elements found in the author’s earlier work, such as a quadriplegic mother, the encroaching loneliness of old age, grief, and the itch-inducing tedium of Florida, The Kingdom of Sand still manages to stun and disquiet with its duality, shying away from neither eccentricity nor the crippling humdrum of existence.

In fact, humor is one of the foremost markers of the novel’s prose. It conveys the abstractness of old age, creating strife between its comedic tone and the sentiment it conveys. This is evident in the following passage, “The only difference between us was that he had played solitaire and I was watching people have sex: a generational decline, I suppose.” This light and jovial imagery stresses the protagonist’s heavy reliance on porn to combat solitude, at once adding depth to an already compelling surface.

We also see that comedy intensifies the desolation that follows in death’s wake, specifically when it makes way for emotional detachment. Holleran allows his comical remarks to start slipping from the pages of the novel, leaving the reader despondent by its end. This is why the novel’s sorrow materializes without a sound, binding its fragmented structure with quiet confidence. The odd thing about the novel’s melancholy is that it stems from the protagonist’s total acceptance of the impossibility of need, the unfulfilled state of his desire. And yet, despite this capitulation, his attitude comes across as almost sanguine.

The mastery of such a delivery comes from Holleran’s overarching depiction of loneliness and lust. In many ways, this blend of hunger and despair reflects the anguished frenzy of youth, to which Dancer from the Dance is a testament. And yet, the novel’s portrayal of the friction between eroticism and undesirability makes the protagonist’s ultimate surrender, his recognition of life’s constraints, that much more acute.

It’s no surprise that Holleran’s prose is largely reflective, prioritizing consequence over incentive. And yet, the moments it conjures are so compelling that it feels less like a summation of life than an endless anecdote, one which titillates as much as it arouses sympathy.

The emotional heft of The Kingdom of Sand feeds on its lyrical sculpting of Florida, which offers scenic references to the ennui and nothingness that come with its luminous sunsets and parched lakes. The conversely lush and arid landscape, while suffocating, seems to respond to the ebb and flow of life. The two intrude on each other, compete for dominance, convey the ruthlessness of the human desire for life.

This backdrop also accommodates Holleran’s panorama of time. It provides mementos that shackle the protagonist to his parents’ house. What comes out of this struggle is a tender evocation of grief, his reliance on the intangible presence of loved ones.

The initial ache of loneliness that comes with the passing of youth and beauty soon makes way for the full-bodied agony of awareness. Death starts to dominate the pages, allowing the story to reflect on the futility of both staying and leaving, belonging to someone and remaining disjointed. Fear of death begins to disentangle need, treating it as a weapon against the ultimate dissolution of life. The fact that carnal cravings keep blooming like fungi after rainfall further points to the instrumentality of desire, to the way it sustains the ego. Holleran also shows us that lust is impossible to unroot, even after the explosive relief of an orgasm.

Since the focus of the novel is on the individual, it doesn’t offer much in the way of momentum. And while this may not appeal to some readers, the story's unhurried pace complements its meditative form. After all, it’s both a rumination on death and a visceral account of the wait for its arrival.

This also explains why Earl, the protagonist’s much older friend, dominates so much of the narrative. Since Earl represents an ordinary man going through the ordinary process of dying, he serves as the perfect embodiment of what The Kingdom of Sand is truthfully about.