The man has stayed on in his dead parents’ house with their ashes and, like a pharaoh’s tomb, their stuff: his mother’s perfumes, a pack of Pall Malls his father left in the fridge, a crystal Virgin Mary. The lake has gone dry, becoming prairie land. It’s a place of few residents, but 27 churches. This sad, beautiful book captures the sensations Holleran’s characters are chasing - as well as the darkness that inevitably comes for them, and us.I could no longer deny what I was: an old man who liked to pee in his flower bed.” So says an unnamed sixtysomething living alone in an unnamed North Florida town. But Holleran also understands them as particular to a culture trained on (as the title of his 1995 novel put it) the beauty of men. Aging, frailty and death are universal themes. It’s rare to find fiction that takes this kind of dying of the light as its subject and doesn’t make its heroes feel either pathetic or polished with a gleam of false dignity. isn’t persistently mordant, but its humor is inevitably of the black-comic sort.

Rather, the suspense is over how - and whether - the narrator is going to confront his and Earl’s mortality.

The tension in the two men’s 'shared loneliness together' has little to do with plot - it’s clear from the start that everybody is headed in one direction, underground. feel like a summation of Holleran’s work, circling tighter than ever around matters of desire and mortality. 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. His new novel is all the more affecting and engaging because the images of isolation and old age here are haunted - or seem more honest and serious - because in 1978 Holleran wrote the quintessential novel about gay abandon, the sheer, careless pleasure of it: Dancer From the Dance. Holleran is witty at times, and aphoristic. The isolation, the long solitary walks taken, allow the writer to look outward, to examine the changing day closely and meticulously, to study a close-knit world, thus building up a complete picture not only of the surroundings but of how time moves in a single place. He is interested in the rhythms of days and the rhythms of the natural world around him and the texture of what gets lost with the years. This, really, is Holleran’s great subject. In this melancholy world that Holleran creates with such stoic accuracy and sad acceptance, nothing happens - except that time passes.

Andrew holleran the kingdom of sand