Guillaume Prévost

The Book of Time

Cover of the original French release of La Pierre Sculptée, the first novel in the series.
The Book of Time The Gate of Days The Circle of Gold
Author	Guillaume Prévost
Original title	Le Livre du Temps
Country	France
Language	French
Genre	Fantasy
Publisher	Gallimard Jeunesse
Published	2006–2008
Published in English	2007–2009
Media type	Hardcover, paperback

"The Book of Time", originally released as "Le Livre du Temps", is a French children's fantasy novel trilogy written by Guillaume Prévost and first published in France by Gallimard Jeunesse. The first book of the series, La Pierre Sculptée, was released in February 2006; the final book was released in November 2008. The trilogy follows fourteen-year-old Sam Faulkner as he travels through time and around the world via a strange statue and some unusual coins with holes in them to find his missing father.

Prévost created the series to help children see how history could be fascinating, basing the central characters on his own children. Scholastic Corporation licensed the series for an English language release in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Translated by William Rodarmor, the first novel was released simultaneously in all three countries under the name The Book of Time in 2007; the final English volume released in 2009

The series received mixed reviews from critics, with the first book in particular being heavily criticized for lacking depth and for its undeveloped characters. The second novel was better received with reviewers finding it action-packed and praising its conclusion, but noting that it lacked originality.

After 14-year-old Sam Faullkner's mother Elisa died in a car accident, his father Allan opens the Faulkners Antiquarian Bookstore and moves himself into it while Sam lives with his grandmother, grandfather, his aunt and his aunt's boyfriend and cousin Lily. Like his father, Sam also closes himself up, even closing the door to a girl named Alicia Todds, his crush. Then his father vanishes. Sam waits for him to come home, but more than a week passes without a trace. He goes to the bookstore to search for clues. In a room he'd never seen before, he finds a strange red book called Crimes and Punishment During the Reign of Vlad Tepes, a stone statue with an odd circular indentation in it and a dusty coin with unreadable symbols. Curious, he fits the coin into the statue, and finds himself transported back to a strange island called Iona. He travels to a village there, where he finds another coin. Fitting it into the statue, he is transported again, this time to 800 AD to a Viking village in Scotland. As he finds other coins, he goes to other places, including France during World War I and ancient Egypt where he find a large cache of the coins. Eventually, with help from his cousin Lily, he is able to transport back home. Together, they learn more about the time-traveling statue and a man named Vlad Tepes, the inspiration behind the Dracula legends, who they believe is holding Allan in fifteenth century Wallachia.