Further Tales of the City

For more than three decades Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture...from a groundbreaking newspaper serial, to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of six novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales of the City is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.

Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City has blazed a singular trail through popular culture, from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of six novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales is both a wry comedy of manners and a deeply involving portrait of a vanished era.

In this funny, poignant and unflinchingly honest memoir, one of the world's best-loved storytellers explains how he evolved from a conservative son of the Old South into a gay rights pioneer whose novels inspired millions to claim their own lives. It is a journey that leads him from the racism and misogyny of midcentury North Carolina to a homoerotic navy initiation ceremony in the jungles of Vietnam to an awkward conversation about girls with President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office of the White House.

If you've ever laughed your way through David Sedaris' cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you're getting with Calypso. You'd be wrong. When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it's impossible to take a vacation from yourself.

An element of drama has always attended Rupert Everett, even before he swept to fame with his outstanding performance in Another Country. He has spent his life surrounded by extraordinary people, and witnessed extraordinary events. He was in Moscow during the fall of communism, in Berlin the night the wall came down, and in downtown Manhattan on September 11th.

Is it possible to write a sidesplitting novel about the breakup of the perfect marriage? If the writer is Nora Ephron, the answer is a resounding yes. For in this inspired confection of adultery, revenge, group therapy, and pot roast, the creator of Sleepless in Seattle reminds us that comedy depends on anguish as surely as a proper gravy depends on flour and butter.

Call Me by Your Name first swept across the world in 2007. It is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. During the restless summer weeks, unrelenting but buried currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them and verge toward the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.

I’m Johanna Morrigan, and I live in London in 1995, at the epicentre of Britpop. I might only be 19, but I’m wise enough to know that everyone around me is handling fame very, very badly. My unrequited love, John Kite, has scored an unexpected Number One album, then exploded into a Booze And Drugs HellTM - as rockstars do. And my new best friend - the maverick feminist Suzanne Banks, of The Branks - has amazing hair, but writer’s block and a rampant pill problem. So I’ve decided I should become a 'Fame Doctor'. 

The tenants of 28 Barbary Lane have fled their cozy nest for adventures far afield. Mary Ann Singleton finds love at sea with a forgetful stranger, Mona Ramsey discovers her doppelgänger in a desert whorehouse, and Michael Tolliver bumps into his favorite gynecologist in a Mexican bar. Meanwhile, their venerable landlady takes the biggest journey of all - without ever leaving home.

First broadcast on Woman's Hour, Prunella Scales and Patricia Routledge star in this popular BBC Radio 4 comedy Ladies of Letters. This collection features all 11 series. When Irene Spencer meets Vera Small at her daughter Lesley's wedding reception, they embark upon a correspondence that is quite unlike any other in the history of letter writing. Both Irene and Vera are happily widowed and endowed with errant offspring. They live in a world of church fetes and amateur dramatics but love nothing more than dipping their pens in the vitriol pot.

Kate Harper and Lydia Wilson star in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Armistead Maupin's classic, groundbreaking novel Tales of the City. Set in 1976 in San Francisco, Tales of the City is the first of a sequence of novels about the unconventional tenants of 28 Barbary Lane, the domain of the eccentric, marijuana-growing landlady Anna Madrigal.

Sally Phillips stars as Clare in the first series of the acclaimed BBC Radio 4 comedy. Like plenty before her, social worker Clare Barker has entered a caring profession so that she can sort out other people's problems rather than deal with her own. A control freak, she is entirely lacking in self-awareness, making her encounters with colleagues, family, and her partner, Brian, wonderfully entertaining and richly comic.

The Vanity Fair Diaries is the story of an Englishwoman barely out of her 20s who arrives in New York City with a dream. Summoned from London in hopes that she can save Condé Nast's troubled new flagship Vanity Fair, Tina Brown is immediately plunged into the maelstrom of the competitive New York media world and the backstabbing rivalries at the court of the planet's slickest, most glamour-focused magazine company.

In October 1940, the handsome young David Sparsholt arrives in Oxford. A keen athlete and oarsman, he at first seems unaware of the effect he has on others - particularly on the lonely and romantic Evert Dax, son of a celebrated novelist and destined to become a writer himself. While the Blitz rages in London, Oxford exists at a strange remove: an ephemeral, uncertain place in which nightly blackouts conceal secret liaisons....

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-out novel from Winterson, the acclaimed author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God’s elect, but as this budding evangelical comes of age and comes to terms with her preference for her own sex, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household crumbles.