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Armistead Maupin

Introduction written and read by Rachel Maddow • Narrated by Frances McDormand

The first novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s bestselling San Francisco saga, and inspiration for the Netflix original series, Tales of the City

“A consummate entertainer who has made a generation laugh. . . . . It is Maupin’s Dickensian gift to be able to render love convincingly.”— Edmund White, Times Literary Supplement

For almost four decades Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture—from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of ten novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.

Frances McDormand

HarperAudio

Tales of the City

A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick

The first novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s bestselling San Francisco saga, and inspiration for the Netflix original series, Tales of the City

“A consummate entertainer who has made a generation laugh. . . . It is Maupin’s Dickensian gift to be able to render love convincingly.”— Edmund White, Times Literary Supplement

For over four decades Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture—from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of ten novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.

Narrated by Cynthia Nixon

""Remarkable. . . delectable, addictive."" —New York Times Book Review

The second novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s bestselling San Francisco saga.

The tenants of 28 Barbary Lane have fled their cozy nest for adventures far afield. Mary Ann Singleton finds love at sea with a forgetful stranger, Mona Ramsey discovers her doppelgänger in a desert whorehouse, and Michael Tolliver bumps into his favorite gynecologist in a Mexican bar. Meanwhile, their venerable landlady takes the biggest journey of all—without ever leaving home.

Cynthia Nixon

More Tales of the City

Narrated by Armistead Maupin

""Remarkable. . . delectable, addictive."" —New York Times Book Review

The second novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s bestselling San Francisco saga.

The tenants of 28 Barbary Lane have fled their cozy nest for adventures far afield. Mary Ann Singleton finds love at sea with a forgetful stranger, Mona Ramsey discovers her doppelgänger in a desert whorehouse, and Michael Tolliver bumps into his favorite gynecologist in a Mexican bar. Meanwhile, their venerable landlady takes the biggest journey of all—without ever leaving home.

Narrated by Frances McDormand

Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City

The third novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga.

The calamity-prone residents of 28 Barbary Lane are at it again in this deliciously dark novel of romance and betrayal. While Anna Madrigal imprisons an anchorwoman in her basement, Michael Tolliver looks for love at the National Gay Rodeo, DeDe Halcyon Day and Mary Ann Singleton track a charismatic psychopath across Alaska, and society columnist Prue Giroux loses her heart to a derelict living in a San Francisco park.

Further Tales of the City

Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City

The third novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga.

The calamity-prone residents of 28 Barbary Lane are at it again in this deliciously dark novel of romance and betrayal. While Anna Madrigal imprisons an anchorwoman in her basement, Michael Tolliver looks for love at the National Gay Rodeo, DeDe Halcyon Day and Mary Ann Singleton track a charismatic psychopath across Alaska, and society columnist Prue Giroux loses her heart to a derelict living in a San Francisco park.

""Maupin's San Francisco saga careens beautifully on."" —New York Times Book Review

The fourth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga.

When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there’s more to making a baby than meets the eye. Help arrives in the form of a grieving gay neighbor, a visiting monarch, and the dashing young lieutenant who defects from her yacht. Bittersweet and profoundly affecting, Babycakes was the first piece of fiction to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS.

Babycakes

Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City

The fifth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga.

Tranquillity reigns in the ancient redwood forest until a women-only music festival sets up camp downriver from an all-male retreat for the ruling class. Among those entangled in the ensuing mayhem are a lovesick nurseryman, a panic-stricken philanderer, and the world’s most beautiful fat woman. Significant Others is Armistead Maupin’s cunningly observed meditation on marriage, friendship, and sexual nostalgia.

Significant Others

Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City

The sixth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga.

A fiercely ambitious TV talk show host finds she must choose between national stardom in New York and a husband and child in San Francisco. Caught in the middle is their longtime friend, a gay man whose own future is even more uncertain. Wistful and compassionate yet subversively funny, Sure of You is the pitch-perfect sixth novel in Armistead Maupin’s legendary Tales of the City series.

Sure of You

The seventh novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga.

Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City

Nearly two decades after ending his groundbreaking Tales of the City saga of San Francisco life, Armistead Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero Michael Tolliver—the fifty-five-year-old sweet-spirited gardener and survivor of the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers—for a single day at once mundane and extraordinary... and filled with the everyday miracles of living.

Michael Tolliver Lives

The eighth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga.

Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City

Following the success of his New York Times bestseller Michael Tolliver Lives, Armistead Maupin’s Mary Ann in Autumn is a touching portrait of friendship, family, and fresh starts, as the City by the Bay welcomes back Mary Ann Singleton, the beloved Tales of the City heroine who started it all. A new chapter begins in the lives of both Mary Ann and Michael “Mouse” Tolliver when she returns to San Francisco to rejoin her oldest friend after years in New York City… the reunion that fans of Maupin’s beloved Tales of the City series have been awaiting for years.

Mary Ann in Autumn: A Tales of the City Novel

Narrated by Kate Mulgrew

New York Times Bestseller

“Wonderful. . . . As compulsively readable and endearing as all the previous novels have been.” — Booklist (starred review)

Suspenseful, comic, and profoundly moving, The Days of Anna Madrigal, the ninth installment in Armistead Maupin's bestselling ""Tales of the City"" series, follows one of modern literature’s most beloved and indelible characters—Anna Madrigal, the transgender landlady of 28 Barbary Lane—as she embarks on a road trip that will take her deep into her complicated past

Now ninety-two, and committed to the notion of “leaving like a lady,” Mrs. Madrigal has seemingly found peace with her “logical family” in San Francisco: her devoted young caretaker Jake Greenleaf; her former tenant Brian Hawkins and his daughter Shawna; and Michael Tolliver and Mary Ann Singleton, who have known and loved Anna for nearly four decades.

Some members of Anna’s family are bound for the otherworldly landscape of Burning Man, the art community in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where 60,000 revelers gather to construct a city designed to last only one week. Anna herself has another destination in mind: a lonely stretch of road outside of Winnemucca where the 16-year-old boy she once was ran away from the whorehouse he called home. With Brian and his beat-up RV, she journeys into the dusty troubled heart of her Depression childhood to unearth a lifetime of secrets and dreams and attend to unfinished business she has long avoided.

Kate Mulgrew

The Days of Anna Madrigal: A Novel

Narrated by Mara Wilson

“Maupin is one of America’s finest storytellers.”—Neil Gaiman 

Set in the early 1990s, the long-awaited tenth novel in Armistead Maupin’s beloved and enduring Tales of the City series follows the adventures of Mona Ramsey, now the widowed Lady of a glorious old manor in Britain’s golden Cotswolds, and her fabulous adopted son Wilfred, as they come to the aid of an American visitor with a troubling secret.

When Mona Ramsey married Lord Teddy Roughton to secure his visa—allowing him to remain in San Francisco to fulfill his wildest dreams—she never imagined she would, by age 48, be the sole owner of Easley House, Teddy’s grand, romantic country manor in the UK. She also didn't imagine that she’d need to open the manor’s doors to paying guests to afford the electric bill and repair the leaking roof. Yet somehow she and her young friend Wilfred--whom guests assume is serving as Easley’s charming-but-clumsy butler--and the loopy old gardener Mr. Hargis, are making it work.

This delicate equilibrium is upended when Americans Rhonda and Ernie Blaylock arrive for a weekend vacation at Easley, and Wilfred stumbles onto their terrible secret. Now, instead of being able to focus on the imminent arrival of her old friend Michael Tolliver and beloved parent Anna Madrigal, Mona will need to focus all of her considerable charm, willpower, and wiles—and the help of Wilfred and Mona’s girlfriend Poppy, the town’s postmistress and local calligraphy whiz—to set things right before the Midsummer ceremony when the whole town will descend on Easley’s historic grounds.

Tales of the City - The book series

Tales of the City - The book series

Tales of the City books in order

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