Margaret Mahy

Seven Chinese brothers elude execution by virtue of their extraordinary individual qualities.

Mabel blows a bubble that captures Baby and wafts him away, resulting in a wild chase that involves the whole neighborhood.

A poor family is searching down the back of a chair for Dad's lost car keys and, miraculously in the mess of things back there, their financial problems are solved.

Monty is allergic to ghosts; if there's one around, he sneezes. When he discovers a ghost named Lulu haunting his home, his mother sends him away to the Brinsley Codd School for Sensible Thought, where she hopes he will learn that there are no such things as spirits. But Monty has only been inside the school a minute when he starts to sneeze. How can Monty stop believing in ghosts when the school itself turns out to be haunted by the ghost of Brinsley...

In these two stories the protagonists have mischievous fun with a former pirate and a band of robbers.

In a world made uncertain by "the Chaos," two time-traveling boys, fifteen-year-old Timon and eleven-year-old Eden, seek to protect a magic talisman, aided by twelve-year-old Garland, a member of a traveling circus known as Maddigan's Fantasia.

A collection of nine stories in which characters encounter talking plants, a pine-tree man, a merry-go-round with flying horses, mystical midnight birds, and a cake-eating tree.