A Play Against Time

What if a rainy afternoon in your grandparents' basement changed everything?

Olivia Davies has a system for everything. Leo Davies has a system for nothing. Between them, they make one very functional - if occasionally chaotic - team. So when a rainy half-term sends them into the depths of their grandparents' basement, they're not expecting to find anything more interesting than old books and questionable furniture.

They find a pocket watch.

Not an ordinary one. This watch is golden, covered in tiny buttons, and engraved on the back with the words: For the curious. For the brave. For those who understand that time is not a line but a room with many doors. Their grandfather knew exactly what it was - he left it there deliberately, for them to find.

One turn of the winding crown later, Olivia and Leo are no longer in North London. They're in Elizabethan England, standing twenty feet from William Shakespeare, who is rehearsing a new play called A Midsummer Night's Dream and desperately needs better actors.

This, the twins can help with.

But when Leo accidentally presses one of the watch's mysterious buttons, things get considerably more complicated. They find themselves inside Shakespeare's dreaming mind - a lavender forest full of visions and whispered poetry - where a mischievous fairy named Puck has made a spectacular mistake involving a love potion. And the wrong twin.

Now Olivia is composing impromptu sonnets about a boy she's never met, Leo is trying to fix everything before Shakespeare wakes up, and getting home depends on a watch, a fairy, and the two of them trusting each other - which they always do, even when everything else is going wrong.

Getting home should be simple. It really should.

A Play Against Time is a witty, fast-paced time travel adventure for readers aged 10 and up - perfect for fans of historical fiction, Shakespeare, and siblings who argue brilliantly.