Tales of the City (Tales of the City #1) (1978)

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by Armistead Maupin



Midwesterner Mary Ann Singleton falls in love with San Francisco while on vacation and makes an abrupt decision to relocate. 



She takes an apartment at 28 Barbary Lane, owned by the mysterious but kindly Anna Madrigal. 



This provides our entry into a world of lovingly-drawn characters from both the gay-friendly, bohemian, pre-AIDS world of 1970s SF and the stuffy, gossiping, status-conscious world of high society. 



One of the major delights of this novel is the way author Armistead Maupin draws these characters into each other's orbits in unexpected ways, providing quite a bit of overlap between two seemingly incompatible worlds. 



Maupin is a very gifted writer of telling vignettes and humorous dialogue. 


Armistead Maupin


He stumbles toward the end when he reveals a truly depraved character without dealing adequately with the issues he raises. 



But, otherwise, this book is full of people I want to know and know more about. 



Thankfully, there are eight more books in the series!




"Chronicles of San Francisco" (French)

"Stories of San Francisco" (Spanish)

"City Stories" (German)

"San Francisco Stories" (Portuguese)

"The Tales of San Francisco" (Italian)

"San Francisco Chronicles" (Romanian)

"Stories from the City" (Finnish)


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