The Kingdom of Sand

Every one of [Andrew Holleran's] books is a gem. If he were straight, his reputation would be immense. The beauty of his language, the empathy for his characters and the world he writes about, are unsurpassed by any other gay writing of our time... He is our Fitzgerald and Hemingway but for one thing: he writes better than both of them.

Larry Kramer, author of The Normal Heart

A powerful meditation on friendship and mortality... Majestic... This vital work shows Holleran at the top of his game.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

An unexpectedly timely novel - wise, shrewd, and in its way, kind, if honesty is ever kind. And written with the sure hand of a master.

Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Andrew Holleran writes about desire so beautifully it's occasionally forgotten that he's one of the best living novelists on friendship. This tender, often very funny novel is a book about that final field of play between friends, when all the masks are removed. I wish it never ended.

John Freeman, author of The Tyranny of Email

[Holleran's] new novel is all the more affecting and engaging because the images of isolation and old age here are haunted . . . in 1978 Holleran wrote the quintessential novel about gay abandon, the sheer, careless pleasure of it: Dancer From the Dance. Now, at almost 80 years of age, he has produced a novel remarkable for its integrity, for its readiness to embrace difficult truths and for its complex way of paying homage to the passing of time

Colm Tóibín, New York Times

Accomplished . . . Holleran is, as always, sharply observant when it comes to human relationships . . . The writing throughout exhibits the same clinical brilliance that Holleran made his own in his rightly acclaimed first novel, Dancer from the Dance, fifty years ago. His prose remains unnervingly precise in every detail. It is also wryly comic.

Paul Bailey, Literary Review

[With] grim wit and flashes of sanctity from above... Holleran's writing is as calmly compelling as the repetitive tasks that occupy a monastic day.

Observer

After sixteen years without a new Holleran novel, this is a welcome surprise, and I look forward to sitting in the sun in the verdant outdoors with this book of loss and loneliness.

Times Literary Supplement, *Summer Reads of 2022*

Holleran renders an elegiac and very funny contemplation of not just ageing but an age... A wistful, witty meditation on a gay man's twilight years and the twilight of America.

Jeremy Atherton Lin, Guardian

Holleran's fifth novel - both melancholy and hilarious - finds the protagonist living out his days in his late mother's Florida home, navigating loneliness, a changing world and a life post-cruising. The book's image of isolation and old age is all the more haunting because in 1978 Holleran wrote the quintessential novel about the sheer, careless pleasure of gay abandon, Dancer From the Dance.

New York Times

Both melancholy and hilarious... Haunting.

New York Times

Bracingly honest and wise... A beautiful way to describe how we fade away.

The Times, *Books of the Year*

Very funny, melancholic... Holleran's prose has the effect of a vast, polluted sunset. His book left me with a sense of peace and yearning.

White Review, *Books of the Year*