This vital work shows Holleran at the top of his game. when the music stops you have to sit down wherever you are.” Though the novel is permeated by a mournful depression, Holleran brings stylistic flourishes and mordant nostalgia to the proceedings, and fully develops the narrator, who floats elegantly on his distilled memories and eventually lands on a beautiful resolution. 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. Andrew Holleran is the author of the novels Dancer from the Dance, Nights in Aruba and The Beauty of Men a book of essays, Ground Zero a collection of short stories, In September, the Light Changes and a novella, Grief. He thinks of their friendship as a “bucolic dream,” the “perfect combination of solitude and companionship.” The specter of death feels to the narrator “like a game of musical chairs. 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.

(His melancholy excursions include cruising a video arcade and a boat ramp in nearby Gainesville, places he’s visited for the past couple of decades.) Earl is a retired accountant and widower, and their common interests-books, music, “fine furniture,” picking blueberries-have bound them through the years as they remember friends of theirs who have died from AIDS and the narrator cared for his ailing parents. The 60-something unnamed narrator strives to hold onto a long, lingering friendship with Earl, who’s 20 years older, and reflects with bittersweetness on losses, past loves, and the indulgences of desire and lust. The geographical and emotional landscape of contemporary rural Florida is at the core of this majestic and wistful rumination on ageing, loneliness, and mortality from Holleran ( Dancer from the Dance).

The kingdom of sand andrew holleran