In these pages, he focuses on his trips to Walgreens and goes into great detail about which pharmacist is his favorite. The narrator notes, “It is a fact seldom observed that after a certain age a single man is a creature no one has any place for.” The last chapter of the novel, titled “Two Loves Have I at Walgreens,” comes after Earl’s passing. It is watching Earl fade away into the periphery of old age that the narrator truly sees what is in store for his remaining days. In this section, we begin the long, agonizing trek towards death as the narrator watches his best friend fall ill. Broken into five chapters, the fourth chapter, “Hurricane Weather,” easily takes up half the book. It’s evident in these scenes that Holleran has a rare ability to capture each detail and each characterization is bursting with just the right amount of mortality and empathy.Īlthough the unnamed narrator has already watched both his parents die - one a swift, unexpected death and the other a slow, drawn-out one - the longest segment of the book unfolds as he’s watching the decline of his friend Earl, also a gay man, twenty years his senior. The narrator’s contemplation is an introspection of sorts, and the story feels like a long walk taken with a friend - some parts are more exciting and others can be exhaustive and redundant, but you know you’re filtering information through a trusted source – someone who has lived life and seen death and has something to say about it – and it’s important to listen to their story. There isn’t a heightened plot anywhere in The Kingdom of Sand, rather, a consistent meandering of life and longing.

This time, however, instead of his twenties, the protagonist is in his sixties, and rather than navigating a provocative scene of life just beginning, it offers a meditation on life that’s nearing an end. While the plots are vastly different in tone and pace, it’s evident that Holleran offers another necessary piece of literature about a gay man exploring his life.

Over 40 years ago, in 1978, Holleran published Dancer from the Dance - a novel widely regarded as a classic work of gay literature about a young man in his twenties exploring New York’s gay scene.

And with that, the scene is set for Andrew Holleran’s first novel in 16 years, The Kingdom of Sand. Rather than stay home and watch porn by himself, his usual preference, he’s venturing out to a “video store” to find something, or, rather, someone to bide his time with. Our protagonist, an unnamed narrator, is trying to break up the monotony of the same old routine.

It’s a dreary day in a small, highly regressive Christian town in Northern Florida.

Andrew holleran the kingdom of sand