'Everything around her was familiar but somehow foreign to her own experience, like a place she had seen in a movie but had never actually visited. She had climbed these weathered steps - what? - thousands of times before, but there wasn't a hint of homecoming, nothing to take her back to where she used to be. The past doesn't catch up with us, she thought. It escapes us...' Mary Ann Singleton - as was - returns to San Francisco a very different person from when she left. Her career has faded away, her husband has run off with her own life coach and she faces invasive surgery for cancer. In such circumstances, there is only one person and one city she can turn to: Michael 'Mouse' Tolliver, and San Francisco. Funny, charming, poignant, beautifully, effortlessly written, Mary Ann in Autumn embodies what has made the Tales of the City so popular over the past thirty years. It will delight Armistead's legions of fans and introduce new readers to a world they will want to immerse themselves in.