Mary Ann in Autumn - Softcover

Armistead Maupin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552777072 ISBN 13: 9780552777070

Publisher: Random House Export, 2011

Synopsis

A hilarious and touching new installment of Armistead Maupin's beloved Tales of the City series

Twenty years have passed since Mary Ann Singleton left her husband and child in San Francisco to pursue her dream of a television career in New York. Now a pair of personal calamities has driven her back to the city of her youth and into the arms of her oldest friend, Michael "Mouse" Tolliver, a gardener happily ensconced with his much-younger husband.

Mary Ann finds temporary refuge in the couple's backyard cottage, where, at the unnerving age of fifty-seven, she licks her wounds and takes stock of her mistakes. Soon, with the help of Facebook and a few old friends, she begins to reengage with life, only to confront fresh terrors when her checkered past comes back to haunt her in a way she could never have imagined.

After the intimate first-person narrative of Maupin's last novel, "Michael Tolliver Lives," "Mary Ann in Autumn" marks the author's return to the multicharacter plotlines and darkly comic themes of his earlier work. Among those caught in Mary Ann's orbit are her estranged daughter, Shawna, a popular sex blogger; Jake Greenleaf, Michael's transgendered gardening assistant; socialite DeDe Halcyon-Wilson; and the indefatigable Anna Madrigal, Mary Ann's former landlady at 28 Barbary Lane.

More than three decades in the making, Armistead Maupin's legendary Tales of the City series rolls into a new age, still sassy, irreverent, and curious, and still exploring the boundaries of the human experience with insight, compassion, and mordant wit.

About this title

About the Author:

Armistead Maupin is the author of Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You, Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener. Three television miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney were made from the first three Tales novels. The Night Listener became a feature film starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette. Maupin lives in San Francisco with his husband, Christopher Turner. For more information on Armistead Maupin and his books, see his website at www.armisteadmaupin.com

From AudioFile:

In the eighth Tales of the City installment, Mary Ann Carruthers (née Singleton) returns to San Francisco and her dear friend Michael "Mouse" Tolliver for comfort after the double punch of her husband's very public infidelity and her diagnosis of uterine cancer. Author/narrator Armistead Maupin does not trouble to "do voices"; instead, he lavishes the listener with soft-spoken, courtly charm and projects deep compassion for the characters he's lived with for more than 30 years. He also offers a nod to the more lurid, breathless style of earlier volumes in the series by providing a theatrically pathetic coda to a major plotline from book one. A.B.G. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Export
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0552777072
• ISBN 13: 9780552777070
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368