New York is a town of more quartiers and arondissements than Paris, more souks and bazaars than Cairo, a place of havens from overwhelming energy and of studios where that energy is generated. Above all else, it is where everyone wants to make a mark. And for a lot of residents the biggest mark of all is the place they live in - no matter where that is in the infinite diversity of the astonishing tumbling ziggurat that is New York. This book looks at a cross-section of these thrilling spaces for living created by New Yorkers. Ranging from the great mansions of the Upper East Side to the Tribeca loft that provides a live-work space for the high-flying architects of MPA, from the glamour of Kenneth Lane's Murray Hill apartment to Susan Sheehan's Arts and Crafts haven in Union Square, from Hamish Bowles's 'tiny Atlantis' in Greenwich Village to James Fenton's fantasy palace in Harlem, from the ivory tower that is the Modulightor Building in Midtown Manhattan to Miranda Brooks's 'garden in the city' in Brooklyn, this is a visual and literary feast of the marvellous houses and apartments of New York.

Jessica and Jane have been living together for six months. They are devoted friends--or are they? Jessica loves her friend with the cruelty of total possessiveness. Jane is rich, silly, and drinks rather too many brandy-and-sodas. Watching from the sidelines, Sylvester regrets that she should be loved and bullied and perhaps even murdered by that frightful Jessica, but decides it is none of his business. When the Irish gentleman George Playfair meets Jane, however, he thinks otherwise--he entices Jane to Ireland where the battle for her devotion begins. A studied satire of art deco decadence and louche behavior, "Devoted Ladies" is a sharp and glittering satire on female love.

In the pieces brought together in Writing Home, Polly Devlin OBE, most bewitching of writers, covers subjects that range over her whole life and thought. She writes about places: about her childhood deep in the countryside of Northern Ireland (where, in the late 1950s, the first electricity poles looked 'literally out of place'); her sudden transition, at the age of twenty-one, to Swinging Sixties London, where she worked for Vogue and became very much part of the scene (although - 'it's like being a provincial at Versailles'), on to New York, back to London, then to the English countryside, and to Paris, Venice, the world over - and always back to Ireland, London and New York. She writes about the people she has known, among them Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Mick Jagger, Peggy Guggenheim, Diana Vreeland ('as fantastical as a unicorn'), Jean Shrimpton ('she looks as though she sleeps in cathedral pews and sucks artichoke hearts for sustenance'), Princess Margaret (who came to dinner and did the washing up, 'which I gabbled she didn't need to - she looked at me frostily and the royal hands went back into the Fairy Liquid'). And she writes about the issues that have preoccupied her: about emigration, feminism ('I grew up in a society where men were fundamental and women were secondary'), reading, writing, collecting, shopping, houses, dogs, rooks, hares, dreams, friendship and the kindness of strangers; about daughters and mothers; and about wishes . . .

This is the story of one glorious gothic mansion, Garonlea, and two rather different women who would be Queen. Lady Charlotte French-McGrath has successfully ruled over her family with an iron will, until the arrival of Cynthia--beautiful, young, talented, selfish, and engaged to her son Desmond. Cynthia is a denizen of the Jazz Age and, on the surface, her life passes in a whirl of hunting, drinking, and romance. But the ghosts of Garonlea are only biding their time. They know the source of their power--a secret handed down through generations.