These 20 first-person narratives portray ordinary people in a language that makes glory of their lives. The narrators are men and boys who come face to face with uncomfortable truths, whether musing on mortality, encountering betrayals, or struggling to understand women and work.

Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy have grown up together in Orchard House with their friend Laurie next door, and now it's time for them to go out and find their places in the big wide world, to do the great and marvellous things they've dreamed of and discover their 'castles in the air'.

Set in the 1930s, Goodbye to Berlin evokes the glamour and sleaze, excess and repression of Berlin society. Isherwood shows the lives of people at threat from the rise of the Nazis: a wealthy Jewish heiress, Natalia Landauer, a gay couple, Peter and Otto, and an English upper-class waif, the divinely decadent Sally Bowles.

Enter the world of Gormenghast, the crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is Lord and heir. It is the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old rituals, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, manipulation, and murder. This work is a sequel to "Titus Groan".

Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which Titus Groan, is lord and heir. Titus is expected to rule this gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons, and his subjects, according to age-old rituals, but things are changing in the castle. He must contend with treachery, manipulation and murder and his longing for a life beyond the castle walls.

North lives on a circus boat with her beloved bear, keeping a secret that could capsize her life. Callanish lives alone in her house in the middle of the ocean, tending the graves of those who die at sea. A chance meeting between the two draws them magnetically to one another - and to the promise of a new life. But the waters are treacherous...

Nella, daughter of millionaire Theodore Racksole, orders a dinner of steak and beer at the exclusive Grand Babylon Hotel in London. Her order is refused, so Theodore promptly buys the chef, the kitchen and the whole hotel.