The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Twelve year old Hugo Cabret lives secretly inside the walls of a Paris train station in the 1930s, keeping its clocks running after his father's death in a museum fire and quietly trying to repair a broken automaton his father had been restoring before he died. When the station's toy booth owner, a bitter old man everyone calls Papa Georges, catches Hugo stealing mechanical parts, Hugo's path crosses with the old man's goddaughter Isabelle, who wears a heart shaped key around her neck that turns out to be exactly what the automaton needs to work. Following that connection, Hugo and Isabelle discover Papa Georges's real identity: he is Georges Méliès, the pioneering silent film director now reduced to selling toys, having lost his fortune and destroyed most of his own films after the devastation of the First World War. A screening of Méliès's most famous surviving film, A Trip to the Moon, draws his hidden past fully into the open, and by the novel's end Méliès has taken Hugo in for good. A final twist waits in the epilogue: the intricate automaton at the center of the whole story turns out to be something Hugo built himself, meaning the elaborate illustrated book the reader has just finished is, in effect, its own invention.

Selznick tells the story across more than five hundred pages that alternate between prose passages and long wordless sequences of pencil drawings functioning like film stills, so that reading it means moving fluidly between a novel and something closer to watching a silent movie unfold frame by frame. It suits confident readers around eight to twelve who are willing to sit with a book this thick, and its cinematic pacing, several long wordless chase sequences among them, makes it a natural choice for reading in a single long sitting rather than a chapter at a time.