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The Kingdom of Sand

A Novel

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The Kingdom of Sand

By: Andrew Holleran
Narrated by: David Pittu
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£5.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends on 5 July 2026 at 11:59 BST. Cancel monthly.

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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.

Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Funny Tear-jerking Witty Royalty Classics
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as a 75 year old gay man this book resonated with me so powerfully, Beautiful and brilliantly given by David Pittu

Exquisite

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I absolutely adored this book. I’d read a few mixed reviews mainly citing the rambling nature of the story, or general lack of story. But to me that’s the entire point of this book. It’s a heartfelt, hilarious account of what it means to be elderly and gay in 2022. Despite being several decades younger than the protagonist, I could still relate to so many of the bizarrely mundane aspects of his daily existence. It’s genuinely one the funniest novels I’ve read in a long time, mainly because the writers observations are so on point and the narrators delivery utterly dead pan. What makes it so unique is its take on a certain era of gay man and how he’s aged. In 30 or 40 years time, when I reach that age it’s unlikely that I will have the same experiences – these days gay men have children, marriage, acceptance within the community and liberties the men that came before us could only dream of. So in essence it’s a time capsule of a book, to be treasured like a jewel.

Funny, frank and fearless. A new classic.

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