The cruel King Shahryar marries a new bride every day and has the freshly wed killed each morning, until he encounters the clever Scheherazade. The frame story of One Thousand and One Nights, the suspense elixir of this world-famous work, can be discovered in this book for the first time in its entirety, based on the oldest Arabic originals, all in one volume. Confident women who outsmart their husbands, exotic pleasures in the palace garden, secret glances through windows, and men's search for the essence of woman: the frame story of One Thousand and One Nights sets the tone for the entire work and builds an irresistible tension that is maintained in various registers over the following nights. For a long time, the ending of Scheherazade's story was lost. Claudia Ott discovered it in an old library in Turkey and translated it from Arabic.