Iain Lawrence

An English boy during World War I comes to believe that the battles he enacts with his toy soldiers control the war his father is fighting on the front.

Tom Tin and his friend Midgely--with assorted juvenile criminals--escape the ship taking them to serve their terms in Australia and head for a Pacific island, forgetting Tom's father's warnings about headhunters and cannibals.

Bad luck continues to follow Tom Tin and his mates as they find themselves aboard a formerly abandoned ship, are taught to be sailors by two black-hearted castaways they rescue, and sail to a Caribbean island where they make important new friends and enemies.

Unhappy in a home seemingly devoid of love, a fourteen-year-old albino boy who thinks of himself as Harold the Ghost runs away to join the circus, where he works with the elephants and searches for a sense of who he is.