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The Kingdom of Sand

A Novel

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

This program is read by award-winning actor and two-time Tony Award–nominee David Pittu.
Andrew Holleran's unique literary voice is on full display in this poignant story of lust, dread, and desire—the first novel in thirteen years from one of the most acclaimed gay authors of our time.
The Kingdom of Sand features a nameless narrator who has survived the death of his friends to AIDS and the loss of his parents to old age and tragedy. Now he must witness the slow demise of a friend just a shade older than he is. Semi-anonymous sexual encounters, gallows humor, and classic films are his tools for staving off the dying of the light. In prose that's in turn mordantly funny and hauntingly elegiac, Andrew Holleran takes the listener from a video porn shop off Route 301 to the memory of parties in Washington, DC, filled with handsome young men, to the lonely facades of rural Florida.
Holleran's groundbreaking first novel, Dancer from the Dance, is widely regarded as a classic work of gay literature. His following works have established him as one of the great writers of our time. The Kingdom of Sand is an audiobook that will burnish his considerable reputation: a reverie to sex but also a stunningly honest exploration of loneliness and the endless need for human connection, especially as we count down our days.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from April 11, 2022
      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 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. (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. 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... 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. This vital work shows Holleran at the top of his game.

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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

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