Thus Joyce wrote to his brother, and at the early age of twentyfive he completed Dubliners - a sequence of highly detailed episodes depicting middle-class Catholic life in Dublin. The frustrations of childhood, disappointments of adolescence and mystery of sexual awakening are related in the opening stories with clarity and sensitivity. In the most famous story, The Dead, Joyce presents a Christmas gathering of friends and neighbours, but there is an underlying tension and sense of despair involved in the plot, which adds a disturbing element to the superficial social scene.