01/08/2024
Maupin’s satisfying 10th Tales of the City novel (after The Days of Anna Madrigal) transports his familiar bawdiness from San Francisco to the English countryside. It’s 1993, and Rhonda and Ernie Blaylock, a conservative couple from North Carolina, discover their vacation rental in the Cotswolds to be more ramshackle than advertised. The owner, Mona Ramsey, a 48-year-old American widow featured in Maupin’s previous novels, inherited the house from her marriage-of-convenience husband. She skirts financial ruin while managing the property with brusque honesty and general carelessness alongside her charming but clumsy 26-year-old adopted son, Wilfred, who is Aboriginal Australian, gay, and single. When Rhonda confesses to Mona and Wilfred that Ernie beats her, mother and son hatch a scheme to hide her on the premises and tell Ernie she’s run off. Side plots involve Mona’s tenuous relationship with the local postmistress, Rhonda grappling with the homophobia conditioned in her by her upbringing, and Wilfred’s frustrated attempts to find a boyfriend. All the Maupin hallmarks are in place, including a righteous conviction that conservative viewpoints are immoral and stupid, diverse queer characters, fade-to-black sex scenes, and a fun if silly plot. Fans of the series will relish this heaping plate of comfort food. (Mar.)
A Good Housekeeping "Book We're Most Looking Forward To" —
"Maupin is a peerless visionary who created a queer community of friends decades ago and is still at the top of his game with this funny, endearing, and totally captivating literary escapade.... Fifty years in, the 'Tales of the City' series continues, and this novel is as charming, witty, and magical as its predecessors." — Library Journal (starred review)
"Pure Maupin. The fans rejoice." — Kirkus Reviews
"Catnip for Maupin fans" — Booklist
“Perhaps the most sublime piece of popular literature America has ever produced… As with the Beatles, everyone seems to like Maupin’s Tales - and, really, why would you want to find someone who didn’t?” — Salon
“A cultural touchstone ... Seen at last in its entirety, ‘Tales of the City’ remains an immensely readable accomplishment that wears its significance lightly…. Entertains, illuminates and ― as always ― leaves us wanting more.” — Washington Post
“These novels are as difficult to put down as a dish of pistachios. The reader starts playing the old childhood game of ‘Just one more chapter and I’ll turn out the lights,’ only to look up and discover it’s after midnight.” — Los Angeles Review of Books
“Seriously moving… [Many decades] into the series, Maupin’s writing remains wildly addictive but is deeper and richer.” — People
“An enormously talented writer… Armistead Maupin always manages to capture what’s so hilariously painfully true for all of us.” — Amy Tan
“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
★ 11/01/2023
A decade ago, Maupin said The Days of Anna Madrigal would be the ninth and final volume in his long-running "Tales of the City" series, but happily he has returned with a 10th, set in 1993, and it's glorious. Mona Ramsey is now Lady Roughton and living in England, having married gay Lord Teddy to provide him with a U.S. green card. When he died, she inherited his palatial Easley House. There she and her adopted Aboriginal 26-year-old gay son, Winifred, rent rooms to visiting tourists. Complications arise, as they always do in the "Tales" universe, when Mona's biological parent Anna Madrigal and her best friend Michael Tolliver visit. And then there's that dead body that is on the move. At one point, Michael calls his transcontinental visit "the melding of old memories and new discoveries." This perfectly sums up Maupin's 10th "Tales" novel. Maupin is a peerless visionary who created a queer community of friends decades ago and is still at the top of his game with this funny, endearing, and totally captivating literary escapade. VERDICT Fifty years in, the "Tales of the City" series continues, and this novel is as charming, witty, and magical as its predecessors.—Kevin Howell
2023-12-06
A late-breaking 10th installment in the beloved Tales of the City series.
In 1978, we met a landlady named Anna Madrigal with a rooming house on Barbary Lane in San Francisco. Among her boarders were a lovable gay man named Michael Tolliver and a bohemian bisexual woman named Mona Ramsay, in whom Anna seemed to take a rather maternal interest, which made sense when we eventually found out that pre-transition, she was Mona’s father. (Even if you only watched the TV series, you know all this.) After moving the story as far as Anna’s 93rd birthday in The Days of Anna Madrigal (2014), Maupin returns now with an installment set in the 1990s, when Anna was only 73, and focusing on a character who’s been AWOL for a while. Turns out Mona Ramsay’s lavender marriage to the now-deceased Lord Teddy Roughton left her with a sprawling estate in the Cotswolds. Lady Mona has also acquired an adopted gay son; 26-year-old Wilfred identifies as native Australian—“Aborigine, with some Dutch thrown in”—and the two are soon running Easley House as a country lodge. As the book opens, Rhonda and Eddie Blaylock of North Carolina arrive. Eddie has just headed up Jesse Helms’ reelection campaign, though the senator has been snubbing him since then. When Rhonda suggests Helms is not a nice man, Eddie throws a casserole dish at her. Her concealer stick doesn’t cover the damage, and Mona and Wilfred get involved. Other plotlines feature Poppy the postmistress, Mona’s sometime girlfriend, who wants to paint Mona underwater in the style of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; George Michael, whom Wilfred encounters briefly at a London cruising spot with a condom table; and Michael Tolliver and Anna Madrigal themselves, popping in for a visit just in time for the Midsummer party. Though AIDS sits large upon the land, the characters are determined to enjoy what time they have, both in and out of bed. When Mona laments all the gorgeous hunks already lost, Michael replies, “I know plenty of ugly guys who died of AIDS.” Pure Maupin.
The fans rejoice.
Maupin is one of America’s finest storytellers.”
