Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

To my surprise this turned out to be a sad little story. Something about the film's merchandise had lead me to expect glamour, but there's more here of squalour. Stories set in apartment blocks usually have that air of desperation which must emanate from people who live in cupboards - but there's more to it than that in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

At first glance the story seems to be about the search for happiness. Free-spirited beauty Holly Golightly has a life of constant dates and parties, making enough money from "trips to the powder room" to support herself in a fair way. But behind her glamorous exterior lies a cat without a name, an apartment filled with half-unpacked boxes, and frequent attacks of "the mean reds" - a state of restlessness and nameless fear. Holly is searching for a place to feel at home, and when her foreign lover flees the country in fear of scandal, it appears that her search is doomed to fail.

Despite Holly's continual optimism, it seems by the end of the story that it wasn't about the search for happiness at all - rather, about the futility of that search.