The best time-travel stories for children

One of this year’s big contenders for that coveted title of “book of the summer” is Kaliane Bradley’s sci-fi rom-com The Ministry of Time (Sceptre), which takes us speculatively forwards a short way and 200 years back. It imagines that Britain has welcomed a number of “refugees” from the past, including the Arctic explorer Commander Graham Gore. The elements that have made this book so popular — the fun, the insight, the satire, the sense of history and even the romance — are also to be found in many children’s books involving time travel.

Adults may already be travelling as far back as their own childhood and reading enduring favourites aloud to a young audience. Among those that have performed the trick of finding their place in a new century are, for instance, Philippa Pearce’s much-loved Tom’s Midnight Garden, written in 1958. Most readers know 12-year-old Tom, who is staying with relations to avoid catching measles from his brother, and Hatty, the Victorian girl he meets in the garden at night when the clock strikes 13. The book is loveable not only because of the magic and the wintry scene-setting but also because of the bond forged between the boy and, eventually, an old lady. It builds on the lasting truth that intergenerational relationships with witnesses to the past are one of our best ways of time travelling in real life.

Victorian, Tudor and prehistoric ages still seem to be the frontrunners in the desirable destination contest in time-slip children’s books. Or parents’ earlier lives, where you can change things. A prime example of the Tudor adventure is Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time (1939), steeped in the author’s conviction, as a physicist, that time travel was possible. This may fuel childhood crushes on the dashing Anthony Babington, who plotted to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots from Walsingham.

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Other books that are now time capsules include Penelope Lively’s Whitbread-winning A Stitch in Time (1976), which introduces another Victorian Harriet. Finding out about her mysterious life is character-building for shy Maria, neglected on a family holiday in Dorset. And many still read Clive King’s Stig of the Dump, in which a Stone Age boy slips into the present (1963). When you get past the classism of the hero’s encounters with the oiky Snarget brothers you are rewarded with an extraordinary, dreamlike final chapter in which Barney and his sister, Lou, visit cave dwellers erecting standing stones at the dawn of humanity.

And there are a few recent picks that belong in the honourable tradition of these classics. Karon Alderman’s Dark Flood (Orion £7.99 9+) is set in Heaton, Newcastle, and narrated using Geordie dialect by Archie, who loves his ailing granda, hates the bullying Robson boys and has an awakening romantic interest in his friend Adila. It tugs the reader irresistibly into the story and into another time zone, as Archie is involved in a legendary local mining tragedy. Ingeniously fusing past and present, triumph and tears, this winner of the Hachette children’s novel award deserves more accolades yet.

Sometimes this genre is simply a way of making a playful plot, in which there are improbable juxtapositions of character and events, without a great deal of contemporary resonance. Books for younger readers often make use of the time machine, a trickle-down effect from HG Wells via Back to the Future and Doctor Who, as a shortcut to history-hopping, as, for example, in Iszi Lawrence’s The Time Machine Next Door books, illustrated by Rebecca Bagley (Bloomsbury £6.99 6+), or Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton’s 65-Storey Treehouse in their popular Treehouse series, which involves a time-travelling wheelie bin.

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But even the light-hearted exponents can be ingenious. Michelle Harrison in Twice Upon a Time (Simon & Schuster £7.99 7+) plays with time in an unusual way. Her twin protagonists can stop it for a minute. One can see into the future, the other the past. They use these skills, and their own powers of deduction, to solve an aristocratic family’s mystery in a stately home. With engaging characters and a lively plot, this breezy book combines a traditional genre and a modern sensibility.

Also part murder mystery is Jamie Costello’s The Midnight Clock (Little, Brown £9.99 12+), which has a nod to Tom’s Midnight Garden in that a striking clock is the connection between the building where Millie lives with her father and his new girlfriend, and the women’s prison it used to be. This leads to a race-against-time story in which Millie has to change the fate of a terrified young woman in a cell 68 years ago. Unexpectedly funny as well as tense, this is a teenage read that shows that one of the strengths of time-travel stories is the chance to throw up ideas about our connection to the past.

Also making time travel more than just an excuse to drop into history, Joyce Efia Harmer’s exceptional How Far We’ve Come (Simon & Schuster £8.99 14+) asks a big question. Would a plantation slave still identify racial injustice in our society? This is the gripping and touching narrative, in dialect, of 17-year-old Obah, who is enslaved in Barbados in 1834 but meets a modern boy who takes her home with him to the 21st century. The experience is revelatory for characters and readers. And there is a poignant choice to be made.

Meanwhile, Obah recognises that storytelling is itself a portal through time. On learning to read she says: “Me never know them little black words can bring a happiness like that, how did they take me to a place far and distant from here!” We can make one certain prediction for the future: that time-slip tales will exist as long as writers are interested in the nature of story.

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