Azario is a spirit child who is born to live for a short while before returning to the idyllic world of his spirit companions. Now he has chosen to stay in the world of the living. Combining fantasy and the vision of a child, the supernatural and the here-and-now, this novel conveys the Nigerian peasant life in the changing world.

What do we do when the world's walls - its family structures, its value-systems - crumble? The central character of this novel, 'Moor' Zogoiby, only son of a wealthy, artistic-bohemian Bombay family, finds himself in such a moment of crisis. His mother, an emotional despot, worships beauty, but Moor is ugly, he has a deformed hand.

Omar Khayyam Shakil had three mothers who shared the symptoms of pregnancy, as they did everything else, inseparably. At their six breasts, Omar was warned against all feelings and nuances of shame. It was training which would prove useful when he left his mothers' fortress (via the dumb-waiter) to face his shameless future.

Ken Nott is a devoutly contrarian, vaguely left-wing radio shock-jock living in London. After a wedding breakfast, people start dropping fruits from a balcony on to a deserted car park below. As they get carried away, dropping more, they're told a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center.

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 .