A story of love and death. A story of writer who wanted to buy a time, but didn't know that death itself is just one bureaucratic phenomenon, and there is no deal with the bureaucracy.Richard is the son of a sea captain sent to a boarding school in North Yorkshire. He is rescued from the cruel environment by a friend of his father and becomes a cabin boy on a pre Captain Cook private venture to discover the great southern continent. His ship battles storms, becalming, pirates and Richard is marooned on what would become known as New Zealand. He is rescued by a whaling ship becomes involved in America's war with the French then Britain, finds love in England only to incur the wrath of his love's father. Returns with his wife to an America fighting for independence and becomes involved with questionable naval tactics. Young Dick is a ripping good yarn.

Crowds make Fausto nervous. Or, to be more precise still, everything makes Fausto nervous. This presenter, for instance. He’d love to throw the radio out of the window the moment the guy goes, ‘News!’, and then proceeds to reel them off, all those boring, predictable Sunday news.Synopsis eBooks 1-6: in Book 1, readers are introduced to the four Great Dragons and all the problems they’ve had since they lost the Pearl.In the North, there’s Norbert, a frost-breathing dragon who isnow breathing fire and his Ice Crystal Palace is melting. In the East, Esma is crying and breathing out acid, her Grand Sand Castle and moat a dumping ground for waste. In the West, Wesley wanders his vast WallywoodHills Mansion despised and all alone, his people starving and jobless, their woodlands flattened to make way for Wesley’s factories. And in the South, Shawnee, a former beauty, is losing her looks and her Coral Reef Grotto is cracking and crumbling. What‘s going on, and what’s all this got to do with the lost Pearl? The travellers set off to find out.In turn, eBooks 2-6 take readers to the Four Corners of the World to meet the Great Dragons and learn a little more about each piece of the puzzle of the lost Pearl. With the aid of madcap friends they meet along the way, including a fierce but clumsy polar bear, eight rapping, dancing Fairy Dragons and a majestic komodo dragon, the travellers encounter the Great Dragons of the Four Corners of the World. As they witness their troubles and the poor state of the people, places and creatures around them, the travellers realise the missing Pearl has a lot to answer for. But it’s not until Grandmother Earth catches up with them, to set them a new challenge, that the final piece of the puzzle falls into place: they find the Pearl, but it it’s not what they thought it was. The Great Dragons have been careless with it, and that’s why they’re now suffering. Their problems can only be overcome once the Pearl is restored. Grandmother Earth now entrusts this job to her grandchildren and their team of extraordinary friends: to put right what she and the Grand Dragons got wrong.