When college student David Rain rents a room in an unusual boardinghouse full of clay dragons, he has no idea that they, along with some lively squirrels, will help jumpstart his writing career.

Rupert Rigby is the landlord of a rundown boarding house. Like Archie Bunker in the U.S., Rupert has some very strong opinions. His tenants include a long-haired medical student, a love starved administrator, and an urbane African prince.

When Ten moves out of her parents home in the mountains to live in a boardinghouse, she finds herself becoming fast friends with her male roommates. But can love and romance be far behind? Ten Serizawa has a two-hour commute through the mountains to high school every day, so she cant spend much time hanging out with her friends in the afternoon. She decides to move into the local boardinghouse, where one of her friends and three other boys are living....

Teenage Bina runs away to New York City's Catherine House, a young women's residence in Greenwich Village with a tragic history and dark secrets, where she is drawn to her mysterious downstairs neighbor Monet.

Anguished young lovers, fallen women, wanted criminals, and all manner of social castoffs: these are the disreputable denizens of the Hôtel du Nord, an atmospherically seedy boardinghouse on the bustling banks of the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, whose lives collide in Marcel Carné’s bittersweet rhapsody of romance, betrayal, revelry, and violence.