Age 9+

Peter’s last words to his father — who characteristically lets him down by cancelling a birthday treat because he has a business meeting — are, “I hate you.”

Later that day, an accidental encounter with an anti-gravity machine transports Peter and his new friend Kate to 1763. There Peter finds a more satisfactory father figure in Gideon, a reformed thief who becomes his defender. As the children and Gideon pursue the stolen machine that might send them back to their own time, they are captured by highwaymen, meet Dr Johnson and Boswell, attend a (thwarted) hanging, and visit both a stately home and Newgate prison. Meanwhile their parents — including Peter’s mother, called home from a Los Angeles film set — are involved in a police hunt for the missing children and learn a lesson about priorities.

Stimulating about the relative merits of then and now, and so convincing a picture of the 18th century that we feel transported ourselves, this first book of a planned trilogy of time-travel adventures is skilled, engrossing and irresistible. The reader, like the protagonists, will find it hard to return to the present.

(Simon & Schuster £12.99)

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