9780062259769
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Babycakes audiobook

  • By: Armistead Maupin
  • Narrator: Alan Cumming
  • Length: 8 hours 42 minutes
  • Publisher: HarperAudio
  • Publish date: March 26, 2013
  • Language: English
  • (8617 ratings)
(8617 ratings)
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Babycakes Audiobook Summary

Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City

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

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 neighbor, 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.

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Babycakes Audiobook Narrator

Alan Cumming is the narrator of Babycakes audiobook that was written by Armistead Maupin

Alan Cumming’s many awards for his stage and screen work include the Tony, Olivier, BAFTA, and Emmy. He is the author of two children’s books, a book of photographs and stories, a novel and the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Not My Father’s Son. He is a podcaster (Alan Cumming’s Shelves) and an amateur barman (NYC’s Club Cumming). Find out more at alancumming.com, @alancumming on Twitter, and @alancummingsnaps on Instagram. 

About the Author(s) of Babycakes

Armistead Maupin is the author of Babycakes

Babycakes Full Details

Narrator Alan Cumming
Length 8 hours 42 minutes
Author Armistead Maupin
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date March 26, 2013
ISBN 9780062259769

Additional info

The publisher of the Babycakes is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062259769.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Fabian

November 14, 2017

Now we see where the genius of Will and Grace and Sex and the City is derived from: This incredible series does not disappoint, it's very much incapable of failing us, and I am happy to report that #4 is better still than 3. SO... This one is the best in the series THUS FAR! And speak of historic!: it's the first novel ever to make a mention of AIDS... but before that gets to be a complete black cloud it provides a background that can only be improved with color and comedy, all of which Mr. Maupin bestows in huge dollops! And: what is it with his characters always getting spirited away, eh? At least one character in the book is always away having his/her own brand of adventures in an altogether different climate, in some other such city. Is the entire saga, then, just about the times, the 80s, the sad gay melodramatic and fabulous 80s (decade of my birth)? Yeah, and its about San Fran, but then it manages to encapsulate a whole lot more than that, extending its comedic plotlines & becoming, as a result, as whimsical (outlandish) as possible, by inadvertently exposing hidden, deeper, more complex meanings in the occurrence of these beloved characters' lives. This, my friends, possesses HAh-yuuGE & considerable historic clout; it's very zeitgeisty. Michael's escapade in London is perhaps the best strand of narrative witness so far: bittersweet, poignant. It resembles a more vibrant, no-less sympathetic anecdote by Alan Hollinghurst. Yup, for me the England interlude was brilliant! The writing is much less erratic this time around: Concentrating on two strands of plot, rather than 4 or 5, is a clear sense of maturity for the awesome creator of some of the silliest stuff imaginable, this side of "A Confederacy of Dunces."This one, Babycakes, a proper term of endearment even for the likes of me, I must admit, is so far my fave. Do it jest git better and better? Damn you Maupin!

Charles

July 13, 2014

Babycakes is a far better book than its three predecessors in the Tales of the City series. Between the previous book and Babycakes, Armistead Maupin realised that he couldn't keep writing about gay life in San Francisco as if AIDS hadn't happened. Babycakes begins shortly after the death from AIDS of one of its main characters. The book aches with the pain of that loss. It's a book about the transition from youth and innocence and adventure to adulthood, with the attendant gravity, ambiguity, strain, pain, and confusion.In Babycakes Maupin also starts to write about the inner emotional life of gay men with more depth, pathos, and authority than he did before. In the three earlier books Maupin's voice is authentic and genuine and sometimes moving, but in Babycakes he moves way beneath the outward shows.Babycakes is sometimes called a dark book, but I think that's mostly a relative judgment. Maupin's writing is still suffused with wit and archness, and Babycakes is still a fast read. The pace, however, is better than before. The first three books betray their newspaper column origins in their identically short, snack-sized chapters. In Babycakes the chapters have more variety, so the narrative has more room to breath. This is especially important in the critical scenes and conversations. Armistead Maupin creates wonderful dialog, and finally in Babycakes those dialogs have space to develop. (The scene where Mona learns about Jon's death is a good example of a moment that would have been ruined by the imposition of an arbitrary chapter boundary.)With Babycakes, the Tales of the City books rise majestically from being frivolous fun to being important works.

LenaRibka

October 15, 2018

I have never been a fan of Mary Ann. Actually I don't understand WHY everyone likes her. Doesn't matter. In this sequel she MAY be overdone. WTF?! How someone COULD come to SUCH a STUPID idea for such a SERIOUS problem?! But I can't help myself. The series is sooooo entertaining that I have no other option as to go on with it.

David

April 06, 2015

Armistead Maupin seems unable to make a plot work without relying on the most outrageous coincidences and chance meetings. So why do I enjoy this series so much? I think it’s because he so successfully communicates his love for his characters to me, so that I am actually looking forward to each unexpected encounter and unforeseeable event that turns everyone’s lives upside down. Maybe Maupin’s style of story construction is a natural outgrowth of developing as a writer in the gay subculture of San Francisco. SF is a large city that probably often felt like a small community, so why shouldn’t the rest of the world be that way, too? Wouldn’t it be nice if it were?

Dennis

March 21, 2021

This soapy, sexy and super silly saga continues to shock and surprise me even as I read the original series a second time. I cannot wait for my next fix of ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ bohemians of Barbary Lane.

Chris

October 12, 2022

Slightly more character driven than the previous instalments and there were some 'twists' I figured out in advance and then others that made me actually gasp! I thought that I was going to be upset with the ending at one point, but it all went perfectly in the end and I am totally obsessed with these characters now. It's becoming a favourite series and I still have 5 books left! I can't wait!

Dan

April 13, 2016

This series keeps powering on. This one, I would say, is the most complete. By that I mean, it reads like a full concept in a way that the other ones didn't. The previous three books read more like a series of events in these really interesting people's lives. There were arcs, but they seemed incidental to just hanging with these people. Babycakes definitely feels more fully conceptualized. It starts with Queen Elizabeth landing at SFO on a raining day three months before Easter, and ends with the Queen again just after Easter. Throughout, we jump back and forth between SF and the UK. The season in both places is rainier than usual. Operating in the background is the death of Michael's lover from AIDS (this is one of the very early mentions of the plague in fiction) and Mary Ann's struggle to conceive a child. Overall, Babycakes is the most somber of the books (so far), but since this is Maupin, that's still a far cry from a tearjerker. I really enjoyed this one, and I get the sense that he was wrapping up a lot of things from the first half of the series. I anticipate the next set of novels to take our friends from 28 Barbary Lane in a new direction. I'm pretty excited for the journey. If you liked this, make sure to follow me on Goodreads for more reviews!

Mike

January 03, 2021

In the time of the plague: this fourth volume is where I hopped aboard back in 1988, with AIDS, Clause 28 and Thatcher/Reagan looming large. We needed some affirmative, comforting fiction then just as we do now: funny how some of the same tropes about HIV have emerged with COVID, including a touching scene with a waiter who confides in Mouse that he’s stopped going to the baths and sticks to the sweater bars now, which causes Michael to reflect that “the virus was no respecter of cashmere.” Plus ç’est la même chose indeed. Salutary rereading.

Sophia

October 21, 2019

This one was definitely a lot sadder than the first three... In between the Aids crisis hit and I spent several scenes crying. There is still some whimsy and absurd humorous plot lines but all in all it deals with human relationships in a very serious way and let's the reader feel all the dark sides

Christina

April 30, 2020

Love the characters and the stories of their lives.

Ayla

December 11, 2019

Great ending!

Clemens

January 06, 2019

Im vierten Band seiner Stadtgeschichten führt Maupin die Leser ins San Francisco des Jahres 1984. Es ist die Zeit in der AIDS das alles bestimmende Thema dort ist. Daran kommt auch das Buch nicht vorbei. Denn auch die Protagonisten der Barbary Lane 28 haben ein Opfer dieser Krankheit zu beklagen. Das ist der Ausgangspunktes des Buchs. Damit durchzieht die gesamte Erzählung eine Melancholie und Trauer, die man so aus den vorangegangen Bänden nicht kannte. Trotz dieser Grundstimmung bietet aber auch dieser Band die gewohnte und lieb gewonnene Mischung aus Familiengeschichte mit lustigen und abstrusen Wendungen.Maupin greift dabei auch wieder weit über San Francisco hinaus und schickt Michael Mouse zur Trauerbewältigung nach Großbritannien. Und er lässt Mona, die im dritten Band keine Rolle spielte zurückkehren.Das ist eine der Stärken des Maupinschen Schreibens, die ganze Reihe gibt einem das Gefühl, Teil einer großen Familie zu sein, wo man sich gelegentlich versammelt, aber nicht immer alle dabei sein können. Daher freut man sich um so mehr, wenn sie dann beim nächsten Zusammentreffen wieder auftauchen.Was bei „Tollivers Reisen“ besonders Spaß macht, sind die erzählerischen Kniffe, die sich Maupin leistet. So verknüpft er die beiden Erzählstränge San Francisco und England so geschickt, dass man als Leser schnell Parallelen erkennt und glaubt, zu wissen, wie die Erzählung sich weiterentwickeln wird. Doch Maupin wäre nicht Maupin, wenn er den Leser zum Ende hin mit den weiteren Entwicklungen nicht doch überrumpeln würde.So liest man das letzte Viertel des Buches mit immer größer werdenden Erstaunen und am Ende zieht man wieder den Hut vor Maupins Erzählkunst.

Ruby

March 09, 2020

For me, this series is consistently fun. It also brings back memories of living in the San Francisco Bay Area during the time these were written as serialized columns in the newspaper. There are some things that might seem dated to other readers, and the characters may start to get old, but I continue to enjoy them. On to #5, Significant Others.

Jeff

May 24, 2021

This one was definitely better than the last two!

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