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This is the powerful, touching story of a young gay man's struggles to survive, beginning as a child in the suburbs of Ohio, then moving on to the bright lights and big city of New York. Throughout his journey of life, Nick Buchanan encounters some difficult obstacles, painful hardships, and discovers the ins and outs of show business while trying to make it in an often exciting, but sometimes devastating world. After nearly giving up, Nick discovers a new sense of strength and resilience that comes from facing his fears, standing up to prejudice, and learning what genuine love and respect for himself truly are.

For so many of us, Armistead Maupin is known for the Tales of the City series of books. Though set in San Francisco, these books chronicled so many of the changing events of the seventies and eighties in such a personal way. Logical Family is Maupin’s memoir, starting with his birth in very conservative 1940s/1950s North Carolina up to 1970s San Francisco when he first started publishing Tales of the City as a serial in a newspaper. This is an amazing and complicated journey that Maupin tells in an engaging and insightful way. The son of a traditional Southern lawyer, Maupin was born into a very conservative and privileged family, in a home that included a portrait of a Confederate ancestor. He grew up to be the perfect white and conservative son, but his journey away from that world is the fascinating part of this story, and it’s his queerness that started that move, long before he told anyone. His description of his childhood is very evocative, but it is his time in the Navy, posted to Vietnam, that stands out. There are tenderly erotic descriptions of the intimate rituals of Navy life, there are comic moments were Maupin struggles but succeeds in being the last American naval officer to leave Vietnam, and there are the tragic tales as Maupin grapples with his sexuality in the face of the very homophobic atmosphere of 1960s and 1970s America. The greatest and most compelling strand of his story is how his struggles and eventual acceptance of his sexuality changed him as a person, forcing him to reject his conservative upbringing and all its values. This is the best thing that Maupin has written since the last Tales of the City novel. Maupin’s non Tales of the City novels always felt lacklustre, lacking the fun, insight and page-turning enjoyment of those books, as if he was trying to prove himself as a “serious novelist” but not quite succeeding. Logical Family is a breath of fresh air; it is Maupin as the natural storyteller, but one with an important story to tell, and Maupin at his page-turning best again. The worst part of this book was that it ended too early, with Maupin beginning to publish Tales of the City as newspaper serial. I wanted to know what happened to him in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s as the world around him changed so much. What could he tell us about those times? Please Mr Maupin, can you write a sequel?

In 1949, the New York based writer Helene Hanff replied to an advert in The Saturday Review of Literature by the London bookshop Marks & Co. Her letter had the list of books that she was looking to buy. Frank Doel, an employee of the bookshop, replied to her and from those first letters grew a nearly twenty-year friendship, though the two of them never met. 84 Charing Cross Road, the first book in this double book volume, is Hanff’s letters to and from Marks & Co. She mainly corresponded with Frank Doel, but other members of staff also sent her letters. Hanff’s and Doel’s letters share their love of literature, drawing the reader into that world, but these letters also paint a picture of post-war London life that turns into the 1950s and ’60s. There is a thread of sadness running through this book, Hanff never got to visit London and meet the people with whom she had formed such a lasting friendship. Fate and life’s expenses intervened every time she tried to plan her visit. The charm of this book is the letters themselves, they reveal so much about the people writing them, especially Hanff and Doel. In The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, the second book here, it is 1971 and Hanff finally gets to make her first trip to London, following the success of 84 Charing Cross Road. This book details her trip, in which she gets to find the London of English literature. Her writing is clear and unsentimental, but she still takes the reader on her emotional journey with her. Unfortunately Frank Doel died three years before her trip and Marks & Co had since closed down. There is a poignant moment when Hanff visits the empty and closed bookshop and finds the gold letters that once spelled out the shop’s name in its window lying abandoned on the dusty floor. Hanff’s writing was always crisp, informative, very readable and shot through with her sharp wit. This double volume of her books, two of her shorter books, which so match each other, are the perfect gateway into the world of her wonderful writing. Regrettably, this world is not a large world, she only wrote a handful of books, but they are all perfectly formed and expertly written. Find it here on Amazon