Significant Others

Nov 28, 2025 3:39 PM

Author:Armistead Maupin

Significant Others

The fifth novel in the belovedTales of the Cityseries, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga.

‘Some of the sharpest and most speakable dialogue you are ever likely to read’ Guardian

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Tranquillity reigns in the ancient redwood forest until a women-only music festival sets up camp downriver from an all-male retreat for the ruling class. Among those entangled in the ensuing mayhem are a lovesick nurseryman, a panic-stricken philanderer, and the world’s most beautiful fat woman. Significant Others is Armistead Maupin’s cunningly observed meditation on marriage, friendship and sexual nostalgia.

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 1980s San Francisco. The result is a glittering and addictive comedy of manners that continues to beguile new generations of readers.

Reviews

Maupin is a richly gifted comic author... there is room in Armistead Maupin's universe for all of us

—— Observer

Comedy in its most classical form... some of the sharpest and most speakable dialogue you are ever likely to read

—— Jonathan Coe , Guardian

San Francisco is fortunate in having a chronicler as witty and likeable as Armistead Maupin

—— Independent

Like those of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Armistead Maupin's novels have all appeared originally as serials... it is the strength of this approach, with its fantastic adventures and astonishingly contrived coincidences, that makes these novels charming and compelling

—— Literary Review

Wise, witty, loving and caring about the foibles and frailties we all seem to have

—— David Hockney

A consummate entertainer... It is Maupin's Dickensian gift to be able to render love convincingly

—— The Times Literary Supplement

It's all hedonism and heartbreak in Robinson's pacy, poignant debut

—— Marie Claire

Aimee Bender writes in a skillfully minimal way, everything very tight and poignant and sharp and often burning, quick to get to things and out of them, but still providing us with significant characters of emotional depth

—— Stephen Dixon, author of Frog and 30: Pieces of a Novel

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