Patience Agbabi time travels into the CBBC Book Club to talk about The Time-Thief (the second adventure for the Leaplings after The Infinite) and some of its real world inspirations!

Watch Patience Agbabi on the BBC’s Authors Live as she introduces her time-travelling Leaplings, reads from The Infinite, answers some questions from young readers and more!

‘People have been arguing over hip-hop ever since it first emerged, in the Bronx, New York, in the 1970s. It was soon the most controversial genre in the country – a distinction that has not, somehow, been erased by time or by popularity. As the genre became successful, then mainstream, then finally dominant, it never became unobjectionable. Over the decades, hip-hop has retained a singular connection to poor Black neighbourhoods across the US – and, for that matter, poor and not-necessarily-Black neighbourhoods around the world. This connection accounts for some of the demands placed upon the music: many listeners have felt that the genre ought to be politically aware, or explicitly revolutionary’

‘What she is best at conveying, though, is the tidal flood of human life and the absurd, unwieldy scurf of manufactured objects that has accompanied it through the Anthropocene. You hang on to your things in case you’re swept away by the water and become like a thing yourself. What can be relinquished and what can’t?

At base, this is a simple story about the links between poverty, mental health and loss. It’s often heartbreaking, but we would be wrong to interpret Annabelle and Benny’s struggles as a descent. Ozeki is carefully celebrating difference, not patronising dysfunction. Out of their fractured relations, she makes something so satisfying that it gave me the sense of being addressed not by an author but by a world’