The ninth installment of Maupin’s Tales of The City series focuses on one of modern literature’s best-loved transgender characters, Anna Madrigal. The tome centres around a road-trip to her home town of Winnemucca, which she left as a 16-year-old boy, and her memories of growing up in the Blue Moon brothel, amongst its many colourful visitors and residents.

The author skillfully interweaves these sequences with the trials and tribulations of the nonagenarian’s extended ‘logical family’ (who readers have grown to know and love over the series) and an eventful visit to the Burning Man Festival.

Maupin’s strength as a writer is not only the aptitude for fashioning a rollicking good yarn, but his ability to reveal his characters’ humanity, frailty and spirit with comedic wit and thoughtful flourishes.

A joyous celebration of lives less ordinary!