Adventures Through Time

The basis for so many wonderful gems in our collection of children’s fiction lies in the question of what it would be like to travel back into the past. In these books, we also meet characters who encounter children from other times, as though they have stepped from one time into another: a time slip. Clocks striking 13, medieval mansions, magical statues in mysterious gardens, sleeping in a certain bed or dressing up in historical clothing – discover what trigger it might be that could open a window for you to explore another world!

Updated June 30, 2024
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Wellington City LibrariesChildren's team at Wellington City Libraries
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The house of Arden
Nesbit, E.
Paper Book
The famous Arden family treasure has been missing for generations, and the last members of the Arden line, Edred, Elfrida, and their Aunt Edith, have nothing to their names but the crumbling castle they live in. Just before his tenth birthday, Edred inherits the title of Lord Arden; he also learns...
Tom's midnight garden
Pearce, Philippa
Paper Book
Winner of the Carnegie Medal From beloved author Philippa Pearce, a transcendent story of friendship that Philip Pullman, bestselling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, called "a perfect book."  When Tom's brother gets sick, he's shipped off to spend what he's...
A tale of Time City
Jones, Diana Wynne.
Paper Book
Time City is built on a patch of time and space outside history. It is full of wonders and haunted by "time ghosts," but it is nearly worn out and doomed to destruction. In September 1939, Vivian Smith is on a train, being evacuated from London, when she is kidnapped by two boys from Time City,...
Countdown to yesterday
Marr, Shirley
Paper Book
Rebecca Stead's The List of Things That Will Not Change gets a "Space Oddity" sci-fi twist in this moving middle grade novel about one boy's journey to go back in time to prevent his parents' divorce. The present is the last place James wants to be. Since his parents have...
Legacy
Hereaka, Whiti
Paper Book
Seventeen-year-old Riki is worried about school and the future, but mostly about his girlfriend, who has suddenly stopped texting him. But on his way to see her, he's hit by a bus and his life radically changes. Riki wakes up one hundred years earlier in Egypt, in 1915, and finds he's living through...

For older readers

A traveller in time
Uttley, Alison
Paper Book
Penelope Taberner Cameron is a solitary and a sickly child, a reader and a dreamer. Her mother, indeed, is of the opinion that the girl has grown all too attached to the products of her imagination and decides to send her away from London for a restorative dose of fresh country air. But staying...

For older readers


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