The Kingdom of Sand

January 1, 2022

International award winner Cercas expands to literary suspense inEven the Darkest Night, featuring a young ex-con who read Les Mis�rables in jail and after the murder of his sex-worker mother joins the Barcelona police and is sent to investigate a particularly brutal double murder outside the city. In another genre blender, the New York Times best-selling Crosley purveys humor, psychological twistiness, and strong writing to create what could be a Cult Classic featuring a woman who leaves a work dinner to buy cigarettes and encounters a string of ghostly ex-boyfriends (100,000-copy first printing). From Dermansky (e.g., the multi-best-booked The Red Car), Hurricane Girl sends 32-year-old Allison Brody from the West Coast to the East Coast, where she buys a small house on the beach and is promptly hit by a Category 3 hurricane that leaves her with a bleeding head and some very confused thoughts. Following Delicious Foods, which boast PEN/Faulkner and Hurston/Wright Legacy honors, Hannaham's Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta features a woman who transitioned in prison and is finally released after more than two decades, returning apprehensively to a New York she barely knows and a family that doesn't understand her (40,000-copy first printing). Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, Holleran returns after 13 years with The Kingdom of Sand, whose nameless narrator has survived the death of friends from AIDS and his parents from old age and tragedy and is surviving his own end time by enjoying classic films and near-anonymous sexual encounters (50,000-copy first printing). In Laskey's So Happy for You, following Center for Fiction First Novel finalist Under the Rainbow, Robin and Ellie have always been best friends, but queer academic Robin has her doubts about being maid of honor in Ellie's forthcoming wedding. In the medieval-set Lapnova, from ever-edgy, New York Times best-selling Moshfegh, hapless shepherd's son Marek--close only to a midwife feared for her ungodly way with nature--is caught up in the violence surrounding a cruel and corrupt lord. In this follow-up to Newman's multi-starred The Heavens, all The Men in the world mysteriously vanish at once, leaving women both to grieve and to rebuild. Prix Marguerite Yourcenar winner Nganang follows up hisLJ best-booked When the Plums Are Ripe with A Trail of Crab Tracks, whose protagonist slowly reveals his story--and the story of Cameroon's independence--on a prolonged stay with his son in the United States. The dedicated assistant principal at a New Jersey public high school thinks she has a lock on the principal's job when the current principal retires, but alas for the durable protagonist of Perrotta's Election, Tracy Flick [still] Can't Win (300,000-copy first printing). In Thrust, a motherless child from the late 21st century learns that she can connect with people over the last two centuries, from a French sculptor to a dictator's daughter; from Yuknavitch, a Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize finalist.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2022
Gay men are the life of the party, we're told, but what happens when it's time to die? The unnamed narrator of this mordant, unflinching novel is mired in what he calls a "predicament" quite different from that experienced by the hip young gay men at the heart of Holleran's most admired novel, Dancer From the Dance (1978), that crucial narrative set in 1970s Manhattan. This novel is about gay men dying alone in a small, conservative, Christian town in North Florida. "Halloween, alas, was the only time there was anything even slightly campy about our town," the narrator complains. In his 60s, he's friends, or at least experiences a "shared loneliness," with Earl, another gay man, who's 20 years older; Earl's illnesses provide a grim education in being old and, worse, getting even older. Earl and the narrator talk about the "UPS deliveryman, or a sale on ice cream at the grocery store, or a new person who'd moved into the rental cottages down the street." And yet Holleran makes these everyday topics, and the seemingly uneventful days of the narrator and his friends, into thrilling fiction. That is partly because this novel feels confessional, with the narrator divulging thoughts and behavior that most of us would be afraid to share. Holleran is fiercely a pointillist. His observations about the minute details of his narrator's life feel revelatory--and not always specific to the lives of gay men. "Love and kindness have a lineage their recipients know nothing about," the narrator declares, including the sometimes unrequited kindness of helping someone else die. Ostensibly about gay men getting older and being alone, this novel is really about everyone getting older and being alone.

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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.

June 3, 2022

Florida is the real star of Holleran's first novel in 16 years (after Grief), narrated by a middle-aged, closeted gay man who moved there during the height of the AIDS crisis, to care for his aging parents. The supporting role goes to the narrator's close friend Earl, whom he met when they were both out cruising at the local boat dock, one of their small town's popular hook-up spots. A retired accounting instructor, Earl has a passion for opera and also devotedly watches classic films. Although no romance develops between the two men, Earl enthusiastically shares his vast music knowledge while the two easily bond over the movies of Barbara Stanwick, Myrna Loy, and Carole Lombard. About the narrator himself, not much is given away, apart from his age--neither his name nor his occupation is known. As he watches his friend's health decline, the narrator's greatest fear is that he will die alone. VERDICT From a winner of the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, this moody meditation on loneliness and aging offers a picture of a life not lived to the fullest. Read it for the North Florida atmosphere and for the affecting portrait of a friendship.--Barbara Love

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2022
""The deep secret of Florida [is] depression,"" asserts the unnamed narrator of this new novel by Holleran, known for his classic gay novel Dancer from the Dance. Set in north Florida, this is the story of the quotidian life of a sixty-something gay man, whose days and evenings seem to consist of two things: taking walks around his small town and visiting an older gay friend, Earl, to watch old movies. Introducing incident to a novel with little plot, the eightysomething Earl hires a vaguely sinister handyman, who gradually takes over his life. Holleran is terrific at description; because the handyman has an average upper body and an enormous butt, he is described as looking ""like a bowling pin""; the men who cruise a local pornographic video store are ""glum,"" ""silent,"" and ""egg-shaped""; old age is like a pipe, ""dry, and corroded."" Indeed, old age is a leitmotif--that and the nameless dread that is infesting the narrator's life. Don't think for a minute that any of this is dull; thanks to Holleran's brilliant gift for characterization, the narrator and Earl come alive on the page, commanding readers' attention to what is a splendid, remarkably good book.

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