TANGLEWRECK (9+)
by Jeanette Winterson
Bloomsbury, £12.99; 416pp

WHO COULD FAIL TO love a time-travel story? Not Doctor Who fans, for sure, nor those of us who have ever wondered how different their life would have been if they hadn’t said this or done that.

Linda Buckley-Archer’s Gideon the Cutpurse, Jeanette Winterson’s Tanglewreck and, later this year, Margaret Mahy’s Maddigan’s Fantasia, all play with the great “what ifs” of history and physics.

“I hate you!” are Peter’s last words to his workaholic father in Gideon the Cutpurse. Sent to stay with his au pair’s friends in Derbyshire, Peter chases Kate, the daughter of a Nasa physicist, into the disturbance caused by an anti-gravity machine, and vanishes. While the children’s despairing family and the police search for them, Peter and Kate are embroiled in life in 1763.

No sooner have they arrived in the past than their time machine is stolen by the evil Tar Man, a criminal mastermind who serves the evil Lord Luxon. Luckily, the two children are befriended by Gideon, a reformed thief who is being tracked by the Tar Man. Gideon becomes their protector in eighteenth century England, and is rather better at being so than either Peter’s parents or the genteel family that adopts the pair.

Inspired by Liza Picard’s history of Dr Johnson’s London, the novel abounds with period detail, effortlessly woven into the plot. Highwaymen and thieves are one danger: another is that the bold, resentful children will let slip what they know about the future. Fortunately, their stories are dismissed by most of the adults whom they try to inform about such things as the fate of America (“that bothersome little colony”), medicine and the treatment of the poor.

Back in the future, scientists grapple with the possibility that the past is open to infinite future interference and Kate’s dad battles to save them. Annoyingly, the story ends on a cliffhanger (the book is the first part of a trilogy), but it will make time go by in a flash.

Jeanette Winterson’s Tanglewreck is her first novel for children. From the opening, when an Ancient Egyptian chariot bursts out of Cleopatra’s Needle and a bus full of schoolchildren disappears by the Thames, the pace is unflagging.

Silver, the 11-year-old heroine, is an orphan whose parents have been snatched away by a Time Tornado. The unpleasant Mrs Rokabye and sinister Abel Darkwater are convinced that Silver knows where the Timekeeper — a seventeenth-century device that controls time — is hidden. Silver is in danger of losing Tanglewreck, her family’s ancient home, with which she has a special bond of psychic communion, and the world is in danger of collapsing into chaos.

Silver is taken to London, where she resists Abel’s attempt to hypnotise her and escapes into the weird underground world of her odd new friend, Gabriel. From there, it’s a race through time, space and the vagaries of public transport to beat the bad guys to the Timekeeper. The house, meanwhile, fights back against two bad burglars and Mrs Rokabye’s revolting rabbits with admirable aplomb.

The tale is told with such sympathy and verve that you wonder why it has taken this writer so long to do what seems most natural to her. Reminiscent of John Masefield’s classic, The Midnight Folk, this story of a brave, lonely, imaginative child is drawn by someone who retains perfect recollection of what it was like to be one.

What is particularly interesting is that, where adult novelists such as Audrey Niffenegger and Liz Jensen have recently used time travel to explore romantic love, these children’s authors use it to explore the moral debt adults owe children — a challenging preoccupation that guilty parents will recognise all too well. The special nature of childhood rests on having the luxury of time, as Dylan Thomas’s great poem, Fern Hill, recognises.

Tanglewreck, like Gideon the Cutpurse and Kate Thompson’s The New Policeman, is partly a satire on our current perception that we all have too little time due to a change in the nature of reality, rather than our own greed and impatience. Neither should be missed.

What's more...

AQUILA (8+) by Andrew Norriss
Puffin, £4.99
Ancient Rome, funny and thrilling.

A TRAVELLER IN TIME (9+) by Alison Uttley
Puffin, or second hand
To a Tudor family home.

THE NEW POLICEMAN (10+) by Kate Thompson
Red Fox, £5.99
Fairies steal time.

WARRIORS OF ALAVNA (11+) by N. M. Browne
Bloomsbury, £5.99
Two teenagers timeslip to Roman Britain.

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