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.

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.