Book Information

One day absent-minded Robert, fourteen years old with distant eyes, becomes simply absent Robert, adrift in history. He falls into picture after picture, not sure when or where he will emerge. On his adventures he rides as a highway robber, dazzles an Enlightment philosopher with a device made centuries after his birth, meets his grandmother when she was just a little girl, and fences with an impertinent eighteenth-century squire to silence his gossip about the Princess he loves. Each time he shifts, rubs his eyes to reveal a new life, he is further and further from the one he belongs in, from his own kitchen where the journey began.