\"Look for your sister after each dive. Never forget. If you see her, you are safe.\" This is the story of Hana and her little sister Emi, who are part of an island community of haenyo, women who make their living from free diving off the southernmost tip of Korea....

\"There are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix that\" This is the story of Darling, uprooted from her family home by paramilitary police, and living in a Zimbabwean shanty called Paradise....

\"I\"m alive inside. A bird is my heart. Mama and Daddy is not win. I\"m winning.\" This is the story of Precious, a sixteen-year-old illiterate Black girl who has never been out of Harlem. Pregnant by her own father for the second time, she is kicked out of school and placed in an alternative teaching programme....

\"She wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.\" This is the story of Emma, trapped in a disappointing marriage with a dull country doctor, she dreams for a life more like the sentimental novels she reads. In an attempt to break from the drab reality of her provincial life in Normandy, Emma takes a lover, and disaster soon follows....

\"Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? - You think wrong!\" This is the story of Jane, an orphan in Victorian England, she is relentlessly bullied and deprived by her aunt and the charity school she is banished to....

\"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink...\" This is the story of Cassandra, precocious and charming, who begins a journal detailing her life with her bohemian family in a crumbling old castle. On the cusp of adulthood, Cassandra meets the family\"s growing challenges of poverty and decay with indefatigable humour and insight....

\"She\"s no good, that girl. Much too individualistic\" This is the story of Fenfang who, determined to carve out a life more independent than her provincial roots, gets a job as a film extra in Beijing. But living a modern life is not as easy as it looks in this tumultuous, messy city....

\"He must know by now, I should think, that I can give as good as I get!\" This is the story of Gigi, educated as a future courtesan in Paris, her days are filled with cigars, lobster, lace and superstitions. Bored and unconvinced by what she\"s taught, Gigi surprises everyone with her earnest approach to love....

\"When I\"d slept enough, I\"d be okay. I\"d be renewed, reborn.\" This is the story of a woman with no name. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. Yet she longs to lose herself completely....