A Wrinkle in Time

The American author Madeleine L'Engle published her young adult science fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time in 1962. The Newbery Medal went to it, along with the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award and the Sequoyah Book Award, and it was a Hans Christian Andersen Award runner-up. It is the first book of the Time Quintet.

Meg Murry is thirteen, failing school, and her father has been missing for years, which the neighbours have decided makes the family odd. Her younger brother Charles Wallace is five, reads minds without being taught, and introduces her to three strange women who can travel through time and space. One night Meg meets an eccentric new neighbour, Mrs Whatsit, who mentions a tesseract, a scientific concept her father was working on before he disappeared, which is the first time his work has been mentioned since he left.

Their father is somewhere that requires crossing through the tesseract, which the book presents as a geometric idea with an explanation attached. The places they reach include a planet where everyone thinks in unison and a darkness that is eating its way through the sky. The rescue depends on the thing Meg likes least about herself, which is the one thing the people with her cannot supply.

L'Engle wrote four further books about the Murry family, and the first novel stands alone as a rescue story. It has been adapted for film and television several times.