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Babycakes
Babycakes
Feb 16, 2026 11:50 AM

Author:Armistead Maupin

Babycakes

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

‘A consummate entertainer who has made a generation laugh.... It is Maupin's Dickensian gift to be able to render love convincingly’ Edmund White, Times Literary Supplement

____________________

When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there’s more to making a baby than meets the eye. Help arrives in the form of a grieving gay neighbour, a visiting monarch, and the dashing young lieutenant who defects from her yacht. Bittersweet and profoundly affecting, Babycakes was the first piece of fiction to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS.

Hurdling barriers both social and sexual, Maupin leads the eccentric tenants of Barbary Lane through heartbreak and triumph, through nail-biting terrors and gleeful coincidences in 1970s San Francisco. The result is a glittering and addictive comedy of manners that continues to beguile new generations of readers.

Reviews

A tender, often wry novel, rendered with impressive period authenticity

—— MAIL ON SUNDAY

Skilful, understated. Comes compellingly to life

—— HARPER'S BAZAAR

Note-perfect. Like a forgotten classic republished by Persephone Books or Virago

—— East Riding magazine

A touching story full of love and humanity

—— YOURS magazine

A beautiful story of love and belonging

—— WOMAN'S WEEKLY

An absolute delight

—— SAGA

The perfect book for a cold winter’s night...an immersive gothic tale, dark and mysterious, in which it seems one must fear the living as much as the dead. Truly haunting!

—— ANITA FRANK

Looking for an atmospheric read to while away the autumn nights? Set in a big house on the Yorkshire Moors, this Gothic ghost story delivers intrigue and suspense in spades

—— GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

Atcmospheric, ghostly and gripping. A gothic tale of magic and wickedness

—— Yorkshire Life

The Black Feathers is such a glorious autumnal read. With echoes of Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, it is both a spine-tingling ghost story and a powerful meditation on grief. A beautifully written tale that gripped me from the very first page.

—— IRIS COSTELLO

Now She is Witch is a beautiful, atmospheric, resonant tale that follows Lux and Else as they fight to be heard and to tell their own stories. Kirsty Logan shows the limited choices left to these women, and draws the reader into their struggles to take control of their own lives.

—— Elizabeth Lee, author of CUNNING WOMEN

Now She Is Witch is a meticulously researched piece of fantasy

—— Skinny

Kirsty Logan is one of the darkest and most playful of writers working right now

—— Stylist, *Books to Look Out For 2023*

Frequently compared to Angela Carter for her luxuriant imagination and love of fairytales, Logan shifts from the uncanny to the terrifying in her new collection

—— Guardian, on Things We Say in the Dark

What Logan brings to her story is a fierce and dream-like poetry that creates layer upon layer of memorable moments and images

—— Scotsman, *Summer Reads of 2023*

Logan…captures the mood of the times with a fearful precision… [she] brings…a fierce and dream-like poetry that creates layer upon layer of memorable moments and images… [Now She Is Witch is] compelling, haunting, and enriching

—— Scotsman, *Books of the Year*

'[An] intricate and finely crafted debut novel . . . The New Life brims with intelligence and insight, impressed with all the texture (and fog) of fin de siècle London'

—— New York Times

'Crewe distinguishes himself both as novelist and as historian . . . He has, more unusually, found a prose that can accommodate everything from the lofty to the romantic and the shamelessly sexy'

—— New Yorker

Unflinchingly bold . . . Crewe's language is striking in its originality, his protagonists are colourful and passionate, and their principles are brilliantly drawn

—— i paper

Sexy, cerebral and moving

—— Mail on Sunday

'Atmospheric . . . Extraordinary . . . Crewe's taut prose is shot through with descriptive vividness'

—— James Cahill , TLS

Exhilarating . . . An adroit novel of ethics

—— New Statesman

'Lyrical, piercing . . . The New Life is a fine-cut gem, its sentences buffed to a gleam . . . [Crewe's book] brims with élan and feeling, an ode to eros and a lost world, and a warning about the dangers ahead'

—— Hamilton Cain, Washington Post

'Crewe deserves applause for his vivid scene-setting . . . There's much to admire in this meticulously researched, boldly envisioned debut'

—— Prospect

'Nothing less than remarkable . . . A beautiful, brave book that reminds us of the terrible human cost of bigotry; this is a novel against forgetting'

—— Michael Schaub, Boston Globe

'Rich and engrossing . . . blending the graceful ambiguity of literary fiction with the deftness of a page-turner . . . A smart, sensual debut'

—— Kirkus (starred review)

A few established novelists continue to write first-class literary fiction on LGBTQ themes... The debut novel by Tom Crewe...reveals a new talent in the field. It is underpinned by extensive research... [with] a great story at its heart.

—— Literary Review

The New Life drives with a satisfying pace and a pleasing sense of both conclusion and open endings... how impressive it is that Crewe has synthesised a coherent and compelling fiction from his elements

—— Critic

Superb . . . Remarkably sensuous and intimate

—— Spectator

Crewe demonstrates rare promise in this beautifully crafted story about two real-life pioneers who tried to make a case for homosexuality in Victorian Britain... Crewe brings this era pungently to life

—— Sunday Times

[An] incredibly assured debut... A fresh take on the historical novel, with desire at its heart, written with a charged certainty that the personal is political

—— Guardian, *Summer Reads of 2023*

A rich, panoramic novel stuffed with vivid characters, heartaches and hazards... [a] brilliant debut

—— Sunday Times, *Summer Reads of 2023*

Crewe's beautiful novel is filled with nuance and forensic insight into love. Deftly recreating the atmosphere of 1890s London, The New Life is a tour de force of intelligent and empathetic fiction

—— UK Press Syndication

A debut of impressive skill... Crewe is a trained historian and it shows: the period detail is exquisite

—— Daily Telegraph, *Summer Reads of 2023*

The novel is full of exquisitely drawn detail, right from the opening scene, making the moral and social dilemmas at the centre of the story dynamic and compelling

—— GQ

[A] pitch-perfect debut novel

—— Spectator, *Books of the Year*

Sometimes there comes along a debut novel that feels like an immediate classic. Tom Crewe’s The New Life is just such a book. It’s a beautifully crafted, seductive story about illicit desires in Victorian London

—— Sunday Times, *Sunday Times Book of the Year*
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