The Invention of Hugo Cabret

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a children's historical fiction book written and illustrated by Brian Selznick and published by Scholastic. The hardcover edition appeared in January 2007 and the paperback in June 2008. It is told in a mixture of prose and full-page drawings, and it carries 284 pictures alongside its text.

Hugo lives behind the walls of a Paris station, where he keeps the clocks running after his uncle disappears and hides from the officials who would send him to an orphanage. He is trying to rebuild an automaton that his father was working on, and the drawings he needs for it bring him into contact with a toyseller in the station and with the man's granddaughter.

Selznick tells part of the story in pictures alone, so the reader follows whole sequences without words, and the book's second half turns on the early history of film, which the drawings present as a discovery rather than an explanation. The format was unusual for a children's book of its length, and it made the book widely discussed in schools and libraries.