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‘My friend Queequeg and I are looking for whaling work,’ Ishmael says.

Ishmael is a sailor from New York. With Queequeg the harpooner, he takes work on Captain Ahab’s whaling-ship, the Pequod. The ship’s first mate, Starbuck, wants to hunt whales for their oil. But Captain Ahab isn’t interested. In the hunt for a white whale twenty years earlier, the captain lost a leg. So now Ahab wants revenge on the white whale – Moby-Dick!

Who lives? Who dies? And what happens to Ishmael?

When the Emperor calls every man to join the army and fight the enemy, Mulan’s father is old and ill, and cannot go. Wearing men’s clothes and riding a horse, Mulan leaves her family and fights bravely for the Emperor in her father’s place.

She is soon a hero for all the soldiers in the Chinese army. One of them, Ye Ming, is her best friend. But does he know that she is a woman? And can Mulan fall in love with a friend?

King Shahriyar cannot trust women. Every afternoon he marries a wife, but the next morning he always kills her. One day, the Vizier cannot find any more wives for the King. What can he do?

‘I can be Shahriyar’s new wife!’ says Sheherazade, his older daughter. ‘God willing I can stay alive, and help the women of our country.’

But how can Sheherezade stay alive for a thousand and one nights? And does Shahriyar learn to trust women again in the end?

‘Help me,’ says Helen Stoner. ‘My sister died, and now I am going to die too.’

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson must answer the question of how Julia Stoner died, two years ago. If they cannot, then Helen Stoner will die too. But her house is very strange – and her stepfather, Dr Grimesby Roylott, is very angry and does not want Holmes there.

Who killed Julia, and how? And why did she say The speckled band!’ before she died?

Sinbad the sailor spends many years at sea. He visits strange countries, meets some strange people and some frightening animals. He is sometimes rich, sometimes poor… and always in danger. But all the time he is learning from his adventures, until finally he returns home to Baghdad, an older and wiser man.