Dating from at least a millennium ago, this is the earliest known collection of Arabic stories, surviving in a single, ragged manuscript in a library in Istanbul. Some found their way into The Arabian Nights but most have never been read in English before. Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange has monsters, lost princes, jewels beyond price, a princess turned into a gazelle, sword-wielding statues and shocking reversals of fortune.

To read these stories today is an extraordinary experience - they were designed to enchant and delight a society almost fantastically distant from our own, and now, centuries later, they can be marvelled at in all their strangeness.