The days of Anna Madrigal : a novel / Armistead Maupin.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City

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

The Days of Anna Madrigal, the suspenseful, comic, and touching novel, follows one of modern literature's most unforgettable and enduring characters--Anna Madrigal, the legendary transgender landlady of 28 Barbary Lane--as she embarks on a road trip that will take her deep into her 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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Time marches on for all of us, including the beloved characters of Maupin's "Tales of the City" series (Mary Ann in Autumn; Babycakes). In what Maupin says is the last of the series, Anna Madrigal is 92 and frail; Michael is sixtysomething and feeling much older than his husband, Ben; and the youngest characters are starting to settle down. Once again, the characters revolve around Anna, but so does the plot; we see her backstory as a 16-year-old boy, growing up in a Depression-era brothel as she just begins to understand her nature. Interestingly, most of the action occurs far away from the eponymous city. Instead, the gang goes desert road-tripping: Anna on a last pilgrimage to the past, while the others go to the Burning Man festival, where the spirit of old San Francisco still lives on in collective art, community service, and freewheeling sexuality. VERDICT For fans definitely, but anyone may enjoy the peek into Burning Man culture, as well as the intergenerational twining of the characters and seeing just how far we have come in accepting ourselves. [See Prepub Alert, 8/12/13.]-Devon Thomas, Chelsea, MI (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

This ninth Tales of the City installment is Maupin's farewell to his beloved cast of characters. While his last few books have highlighted San Francisco's Michael "Mouse" Tolliver and Mary Ann Singleton, the author updates fans with 28 Barbary Lane's now-92-year-old transgendered landlady, Anna Madrigal. Anna is given the snappy, plucky dialogue she's known for, and some chapters reveal her backstory, including her 1930s childhood, when she was a boy named Andy. Everyone is on hand here: Brian, Mary Ann's ex and father of her daughter Shawna, makes an appearance, accompanied by his "fiftyish and luscious" new wife Wren, a former plus-sized model, along with Mouse and Mary Ann. Maupin's flare for dialogue and fully-realized, contemporary characterization is again on display, as he keeps things hip with the use of modern vernacular ("amazeballs", "chillax") and by incorporating iPads (Jake's "magic slate"), Angry Birds, missives on Twitter, and hooking up on Facebook. The story culminates in the group's attendance at the Burning Man "Fertility 2.0" festival, as Shawna searches for a sperm donor while Brian, Wren, and Anna detour off to Winnemucca for a revelatory reunion with Anna's past. Limned with the comfort of unconditional love yet reflective of the frailty, the uncertainty, and the beauty of aging, this installment is a memorable, satisfying capstone to his series. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Alas, this is the ninth and final novel in Maupin's beloved Tales of the City series, the first three volumes of which were made into a television miniseries starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis, which has now achieved cult status. But let's not mourn the end of this run of rich, loving novels. Instead, let's read this tender last one as a celebration of the wonderful characters Maupin created, whose lives have centered on landlady and den-mother Anna Madrigal's home at 28 Barbary Lane in San Francisco. Anna is now 92 years old, as infirm as her age would dictate, but the feisty, generous, selfless spirit that has guided her and attracted so many people to her side remains unbroken. While a group of her friends heads off to Burning Man, the wild arts festival held yearly in the Nevada desert, other friends of Anna's take her back to her hometown, also in Nevada, which she has not visited since she left there as a boy in the 1930s, and where she now hopes to reconcile a situation that has been on her mind since then. Admirably, Maupin's last novel in the series is as compulsively readable and endearing as all previous novels have been. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: An eight-city author tour will be accompanied by national-media and online-publicity campaigns.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

More "Tales of the City" (Mary Ann in Autumn, 2010, etc.), with the former residents of 28 Barbary Ln. still fluttering around their erstwhile landlady. Anna Madrigal is now 93 and very frail, but she's still got the gender-crossing panache that led her away from the whorehouse her mother ran in Winnemucca, Nev., and from the unwanted appendages associated with her youth as a boy named Andy. Having had one of the earliest sex-change operations in the U.S., Anna is a legend in the transgender community, and her young caretaker, Jake, has built a special float for her to ride at this year's Burning Man festival to receive what everyone knows will probably be her final accolades. He is ultimately persuaded by others in their San Francisco circle that it's too risky, and indeed, the closing chapters' vivid depiction of the "mosh pit in the desert," as Michael Tolliver calls Burning Man, makes it seem an unlikely place for an elderly lady. But while Michael, husband Ben, bisexual celebrity Shawna (who's looking for a sperm donor) and many others are cavorting in the Nevada desert, Anna has unfinished business in not-too-far-away Winnemucca, to which she has persuaded Shawna's father (and Michael's close friend), Brian, and his new wife, Wren, to drive her in their air-conditioned RV. So it's no surprise when Anna finally ends up at Burning Man after the not-terribly-dramatic resolution to a conflict laid out in flashbacks to the year she left home at 16. Readers not up to speed on the series may have trouble sorting out all the relationships (and genders), but Maupin spins his usual good-hearted web of intrigues involving people who have created their own community to shelter them from disapproving straights. The plot is as soap-operatic as usual, though thankfully, Maupin has abandoned the lurid improbabilities that marred Mary Ann in Autumn in favor of touching reunions and reconciliations. Sweet, undemanding entertainment most suitable for longtime fans.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.