Michael Tolliver, the sweet-spirited Southerner in Armistead Maupin's classic Tales of the City series, lives on in this novel about growing older joyfully. Almost twenty years after ending his saga of San Francisco life, author Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero, letting the 55-year-old gardener tell his own story. Having survived the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers, Michael has learned to embrace the random pleasures of life,...

"I'm a fabulist by trade," warns Gabriel Noone, a late-night radio storyteller, as he begins to untangle the skeins of his tumultuous life: his crumbling ten-year love affair, his disaffection from his Southern father, his longtime weakness for ignoring reality. Gabriel's most sympathetic listener is Pete Lomax, a thirteen-year-old fan in Wisconsin whose own horrific past has left him wise and generous beyond his years. But when this virtual father-son...