Whether or not your family is able to go abroad this summer may not be as much a disaster as parents are wont to believe. My children recently listened to The Story of the Amulet — the superb Naxos audiobook of the sequel to E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It — which has a curiously topical feel. Stuck in London during the summer holidays, the four bored children rediscover the magical Psammead, plus a marvellous amulet that enables them to travel to places in the ancient world in search of its other half. The result is one of the best and funniest time-travel stories, and one gold standard for a yarn of this kind, the other being Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future films. The latter, with their logical puzzles about changing the future, have had a lasting influence on literature of this kind — though my own favourite so far is N. M. Browne’s Warriors trilogy, which has more of the numinous, emotionally charged feeling that Nesbit evokes. Linda Buckley-Archer’s trilogy, which began with Gideon the Cutpurse and which reaches its conclusion this week with Time Quake, returns to the formula of a mysterious machine (or two, as it happens) that mistakenly takes a boy and a girl back to the 18th century.

There, Peter and Kate meet two men — the reformed thief Gideon, who narrates part of the tale, and his brother the Tar Man, who works for the real villain of the novel, Lord Luxon. The children’s situation has become ever more desperate, with Luxon stealing the only time travel machine left and setting off a “time quake”. One parallel world has Peter for ever stranded, embittered and grown up, in the 18th century, but by the end of the second novel the children were both stuck in the past. Yet that is by no means the least of their problems.

For what Luxon does is exactly what a modern child would do: he uses the time machine to amass a vast fortune in 21st-century New York. In so doing, he also learns to his disgust how a certain Washington in 1776 brought victory and independence for Britain’s American colony ... and discovers just how to “see a path through the quagmire of history”. The results are not as beneficial as Lord Luxon believes.

Buckley-Archer tells her tale with tremendous zest, narrative sophistication and an infectious sense of fun. Anyone with a modest grasp of modern history enjoys playing “what if?”, especially about this revolutionary age, but her description of Luxon’s men sobbing their loyal hearts out in a Manhattan cinema while watching Lord of the Rings suggests that she has the born storyteller’s grasp of what is funny and fascinating. Like the immortal Nesbit, she has a fair stab at leavening two centuries of scientific discovery and political advances with sympathetically drawn characters, both child and adult.

There are, however, certain logical flaws to the resolution of the tale that readers will almost certainly find annoying. Buckley-Archer keeps far too large a cast going, and having one of them being suddenly able to move between time as an act of will makes it far too easy for a happy resolution to come about. All the same, if your children are finding that the hours of freedom lie heavily on them, it will be more amusing for them than anything on in the cinemas.

Time Quake by Linda Buckley-Archer (Simon & Schuster, £12.99; Buy this book; 384pp)

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