Beauty of Men: A Novel

“Profoundly sad, elegant and insightful. . . . Holleran’s trademark prose—lush, carefully cadenced and keenly observed—creates a mesmerizingly claustrophobic world.”—Publishers Weekly Andrew Holleran’s classic novel of loneliness, obsessive desire, unfulfilled dreams, and the loss of youth, set in the mid-1990s amid the ravaging AIDS crisis. Forty-seven, gay, and alone, Lark leaves behind his youth and dreams in New York City to care for his dying mother in Florida. Mourning the passing of his glamorous younger self to time and the lives of friends and acquaintances to AIDS, he looks back on his past, to years spent in pursuit of hedonistic pleasures. Middle-aged, gray, and now seemingly invisible to the world around him, Lark has survived while those around him have all been taken. Left with nothing but his memories, he is forced to contemplate the cruel emptiness and bitter loneliness of his life while longing for a stunningly handsome man, who haunts is days and dreams. Gorgeous and haunting, Andrew Holleran’s heartbreaking novel is beyond its time; a study of the human condition and our yearning for meaning, purpose, and love in a cold and capricious world.