Traces the history of measuring time, from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century.

"From the author of Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Tales from the Café comes another story of four new customers, each of whom is hoping to take advantage of Café Funiculi Funicula's time-traveling offer. Along with some familiar faces from Kawaguchi's previous novels, readers will also be introduced to a daughter, a comedian, a sister and a lover, each with something they wish they had said differently"--

"Two events made September 1st a memorable day for Jesse Cullum. First, he lost a pair of Oakley sunglasses. Second, he saved the life of President Ulysses S. Grant. It's the near future, and the technology exists to open doorways into the past--but not our past, not exactly. Each "past" is effectively an alternate world, identical to ours but only up to the date on which we access it. And a given "past" can only be reached once. After a passageway...

Draws on the author's signature quirky language to explore the emotional complexities between parents and children in such stories as "Wildfire Johnny" and "Scroll Through the Weapons."

After being punished for trying to measure God's greatest gift, Father Time returns to Earth along with a magical hourglass and a mission: a chance to redeem himself by teaching two earthly people the true meaning of time.

"One brilliant June day when Mia Jacob can no longer see a way to survive, the power of words saves her. The Scarlet Letter was written almost two hundred years earlier, but it seems to tell the story of Mia's mother, Ivy, and their life inside the Community -- an oppressive cult in western Massachusetts where contact with the outside world is forbidden, and books are considered evil. But how could this be? How could Nathaniel Hawthorne have so perfectly...

Jack and his younger sister take a trip in their tree house back to ancient Egypt, where they help a queen's mummy continue her voyage to the Next Life.

"It's 2014 and Amy Daughters is a forty-six-year-old stay-at-home mom living in Dayton, Ohio. She returns to her hometown of Houston over the Thanksgiving holiday to discuss her parents' estate--and finds herself hurled back in time. Suddenly, it's 1978, and she is forced to spend thirty-six hours in her childhood home with her nuclear family, including her ten-year-old self. Over the next day and a half, she reconsiders every feeling she's ever had,...