The Story of the Amulet

Four children longing for their absent parents rediscover the Psammead in a Camden Town pet shop. The grumpy sand-fairy no longer grants wishes, but it points them toward a fractured amulet, half of which lies lost somewhere in the deep past. With only a word of power as their guide, they leap backward through centuries: to ancient Egypt where sphinxes whisper, to Babylon where a restless queen threatens to rewrite the present, to Atlantis before its drowned glory. Each temporal jump risks stranding them forever. Each encounter with history brings wonder and terror in equal measure. Gore Vidal called it "a time machine story, only the device is not a machine but an Egyptian amulet" of "considerable beauty." A century later, what remains astonishing is what Nesbit understood: children are adventurers capable of meeting the vastness of time itself.