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 was released on January 30, 2007, and the paperback edition was released on June 2, 2008. With 284 pictures between the book's 533 pages, the book depends as much on its pictures as it does on the words. Selznick himself has described the book as "not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things".

The book received positive reviews, with praise for its illustrations and plot. It won the 2008 Caldecott Medal, the first novel to do so, as the Caldecott Medal is for picture books, and was adapted by Martin Scorsese as the 2011 film Hugo.

The book's primary inspiration is the true story of turn-of-the-century French pioneer filmmaker Georges Méliès, his surviving films, and his collection of mechanical, wind-up figures called automata. Selznick decided to add an Automaton to the storyline after reading Gaby Wood's 2003 book Edison's Eve, which tells the story of Edison's attempt to create a talking wind-up doll. Méliès owned a set of automata, which were sold to a museum but lay forgotten in an attic for decades. Eventually, when someone re-discovered them, they had been ruined by rainwater. At the end of his life, Méliès was destitute, even as his films were screening widely in the United States. He sold toys from a booth in a Paris railway station, which provides the setting of the story. Selznick drew Méliès's real door in the book, as well as real columns and other details from the Montparnasse railway station in Paris, France.

In 1930s Paris, young Hugo Cabret and his father repair an automaton at the museum where his father works. When Hugo's father dies in a fire, his uncle brings him to live and work at the train station maintaining the clocks. His uncle disappears, and Hugo keeps the clocks running by himself, living inside the station walls and stealing food from the shops. One day, he rescues the automaton from the burnt museum in hopes of restoring it. Later, he discovers a keyhole in the shape of a heart, and works on finding the key.

A few months later, Hugo is caught stealing from a toy booth and is forced to return his stolen tools and mechanisms, as well as his notebook containing his father's drawings of the automaton. Hugo follows the shopkeeper to his house but fails to retrieve his notebook. A girl in the house named Isabelle promises him she will make sure the notebook is not destroyed.

The next day, Hugo returns to the toy booth, where the shopkeeper tells him the notebook has been burnt; he encounters Isabelle, who assures him it is safe. Isabelle brings him to a bookshop to meet her friend Etienne, who sneaks them into the cinema; Papa Georges, the shopkeeper, has forbidden Isabelle from watching films.

Papa Georges forces Hugo to work at the toy booth, with the possibility of returning the Diary; the job further delays Hugo's clock duties. Hugo and Isabelle visit the theater but learn Etienne has been fired for sneaking children in, so Isabelle unlocks the door with a bobby pin. They are kicked out, and Hugo is almost caught by the station inspector. Isabelle asks Hugo about his life, but he runs away, fearing that sharing the truth will send him to an orphanage or prison. Isabelle chases him but trips, revealing a heart-shaped key around her neck, which Hugo realizes is the key to the automaton.

The next morning, Hugo learns that Isabelle has read his diary. He pickpockets the key with a technique learned from a book on magic and returns to his hidden room, where he is confronted by Isabelle. They use the key to activate the auto-machine, which produces a drawing of a rocket which has landed in one of the eyes of the "man in the Moon."