MARY ANN IN AUTUMN

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 gay 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 57, 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 speckled 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 multi-character 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.

Over 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.

“Taken as a whole, the seven-book Tales series is the best thing anyone has ever written about San Francisco. I want to live in these books. Pure pleasure.”
                                                                        - Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of it All.

“A pop cultural phenomenon that has come to define a San Francisco era and ethos.”                                                                                       - Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times

“Armistead Maupin is a first rate, world-class novelist, creating characters so vivid, complicated, tender and true as to seem utterly timeless.” - Stephen McCauley

“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?”
                       -Laura Miller, The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors