Author:
Narrator: TBD
Format: Unabridged-CD
Publisher: HarperAudio
Published: Nov 2010
Genre: Fiction - General
Retail Price: $34.99
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.
Armistead Maupin is so perfect as the reader of his own stories, it's kind of a shame that most of his fans will read it rather than listen to his reading of it. Much of this small novel is a trip down memory lane, reintroducing the now aging characters of Maupin's Tales of the City series. But the last third of the book involves some surprising plot twists that make this story more substantial and much more moving than you would have expected from the first part. I always feel better about the world and our chances for happiness and fulfillment after a dose of Maupin and this audiobook is no exception.