One of our shining originals of gay fiction is back with a new novel about aging in Florida. The story is told in a circular style with a slow pace. This deliberate style helps to create the feelings of regret and reevaluation we experience as we age, but it does make for a slow-paced and dry read. When the book returned to the same topic repeated between every few pages, it brought me out of the story and made me wonder if I’d lost my page.

I appreciate the descriptive passages about the interior of the the main character’s home (the patio, the dusty collections, landscape plantings) - and suburban neighborhood. Male novelists and their male characters rarely give us this kind of “domestic” reflection about “the things we accumulate during a lifetime but cannot bear to part with before we die.” Hearing how a gay male character settles into a home is an important story.

The nameless main character grows a late-in-life friendship with another gay man who lives near-by. While remaining independent and somewhat distant, this is a striking portrait of queer friendship.

My favorite novel by Andrew Holleran is Grief. Reading this novel made me want to re-read it.

What a beautiful, and melancholic, and deeply felt novel.

In THE KINGDOM OF SAND, Holleran once again explores aging, queerness, and grief, though with a maturity and mournfulness that perhaps his previous novels lacked. In the novel, which begins with a series of vignettes to only make way to a large chapter (most of the book) about the narrator's friendship with a man named Earl, we follow our narrator as he hangs around Florida, a state to which he has a complicated relationship. We learn about his upbringing, and his relationship to his parents, how he took care of them both the way he eventually fears taking care of Earl, and how someone will one day have to take care of him as well. There's so much thinking through aging in this novel. It was often a depressing read, but the prose was gorgeous, and I enjoyed spending time with Holleran's words. There's little in terms of traditional plot, but much in terms of memory. I think many long-time Holleran readers will be pleased here, and hopefully he'll find a new readership too.

Thank you for the e-galley!

Wonderful prose from a fantastic writer. This elegiac book left me full of sorrow, but also so satisfied. I love the narrative voice and the places this story went.

I recommend having a soft cat, a huge mug of tea and a pillow to hug, because Holleran knows how to draw all of the emotion out of you. It was impossible to put down, as most look back stories are, and I was along for every heartbreaking dramatic moment of his past. Florida is an extra character here, and I found myself smiling at the narrator's choices.

Must read, you will not be disappointed, but thoroughly engrossed.

Reading this book did not feel like reading a book.

It felt like listening to a (very eloquent) neighbor chat about their life. THE KINGDOM OF SAND has the same looping, tangential quality as a verbal discussion, and shares the same spectrum of "really interesting" to "really boring" as such discussions do.

What's it about? Well .... nothing. Nothing except an aging man who hates Florida and cannot stop wondering about death. There is no "plot" in the traditional sense, just a series of ruminations and observations connected by the nameless narrator. I was impressed by how aggressively real the narrator felt (see previous paragraph) and to be honest, I'm still struggling with the idea that he's a fictional character invented by Andrew Holleran. That's the genius of the book, I think; it feels unquestionably true.

I also appreciated how *peripheral* the perspective of KINGDOM OF SAND was. The narrator is aging, lonely, gay, and from a very niche section of middle-class Florida. He's snobbish and old-fashioned, a total product of his time. Ultimately, I think, this is about a man struggling to find his worth when it already feels too late, surrounded by nothing except decline. And if that sounds depressing, well, it ... kind of is. But I also found I couldn't look away.

This is far from a typical "enjoyable" read. And as someone in their early 20s, it did occasionally feel like I was listening in on a conversation not meant for me. But for all the slowness and repetition, for all the gloom and cattiness, I couldn't stop thinking about this book, even after I'd finished. The writing is subtle genius. Verdict: although it's one I'd hesitate to recommend wholeheartedly, I am very glad to have been introduced to Holleran's work.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Disclosure: I received a free ARC copy of this book through Naturally in exchange for my honest review.

In 1978 Andrew Holleran published Dancer From The Dance which is widely considered one of the most important books of American Queer literature. Now after a 13-year absence, he is back with his novel The Kingdom of Sand. I have yet to read his novels Nights in Aruba, The Beauty of Men, and Grief, but from reading their synopses I think it is safe to say there is at least some interconnectedness between the books and Kingdom of Sand. Since I have not read the other books I will be reviewing this book as a stand-alone novel. The Kingdom of Sand is a slow book that moves like the older characters who inhabit it. Holleran who is now in his late 70s has written a book that examines the anxieties of growing old as a gay man of a certain generation and facing one's mortality. The Kingdom of Sand is a beautiful and achingly lonely text that explores the indignities of daring to grow old in a community that covets youth. The invisibility that older gay men feel and the isolation of aging in the conservative south. With rich descriptions, Holleran brings us to the outskirts of Gainesville Florida where our nameless narrator is facing what are supposed to be his golden years. Living in the house of his long-deceased parents he finds himself watching time slip from his fingers as he rushes towards the future in a house haunted by the past. His few joys in life are his long walks through town and his cherished relationship with his friend Earl. Earl, a retired professor 20 years the narrator's senior, offers a glimpse of what is to become of his own twilight years. Through his friendship with Earl, the narrator laments the humiliation that is growing old and ponders his own inevitable demise. The Kindom of Sand offers a view into a world rarely explored in LGBTQIA+ literature. Death within LGBTQIA+ literature is nothing new but it is so often only written about in tragic terms at the hands of violence or AIDS. This book broke my heart in so many ways as it offers no catharsis only the sad truth that so many of our elders face their end days alone .

Kingdom of Sand follows our unnamed narrator as he grapples with old-age. Drawing on age, queerness, loneliness, and grief - we are given a front row seat to one mans unraveling in Florida. The novel is unhurried, and gives the reader plenty of time to ruminate on the crippling monotony of being alive while simultaneously waiting to die.

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. All in all, I just really couldn’t find a reason to continue reading.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eARC.

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.

Author Andrew Holleran, in his first novel in 13 years, takes on aging and dying in The Kingdom of Sand. Aging can be boring and depressing, we learn. Holleran starts the novel with an exceptionally boring description of Florida highways, and he ends it with a trip through his neighborhood looking at Christmas decorations. Yet despite these detours, there are plenty of observations on the main topics which give the novel the feel of a memoir. Not much new is learned, but Holleran does have some interesting observations.
Thanks NetGalley for the ARC.

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.