One Thousand and One Nights

Scheherazade telling stories to save her own life, night after night for a thousand and one nights. Aladdin and the lamp; Ali Baba and the forty thieves; Sinbad's seven voyages. The frame-tale form that shaped a thousand later books from Boccaccio to Borges. For a child of ten, Andrew Lang's Arabian Nights Entertainments or Geraldine McCaughrean's One Thousand and One Arabian Nights; for adults, Husain Haddawy's translation from the earliest manuscripts.