The Watchmaker of Filigree Street Series in Order
The series currently consists of two novels. Both follow the same central characters and must be read in order — the second book picks up directly from where the first ends and assumes familiarity with the first novel's events and revelations.
London, 1883. Thaniel Steepleton, a Home Office telegraph operator, finds a gold watch in his pocket with no explanation for how it got there. Months later, the watch saves his life during a bombing — and the trail leads to a Japanese watchmaker named Keita Mori on Filigree Street, Knightsbridge. Thaniel moves in as a lodger. What follows is a slow-burning mystery about Irish nationalist bombings, a physicist named Grace Carrow who is investigating the nature of light, and the impossible question of how Mori seems to know things before they happen.
Start here. The novel works as a standalone and the first read is best experienced without knowing too much about Mori's abilities in advance.
Japan, 1888. Thaniel is sent to Tokyo as a translator at the British legation, and Mori is already there. Political pressure is mounting between Russia and Japan, ghosts are appearing across the country, and Mori's abilities are being tested in ways the first book only hinted at. The relationship between the two men is more fully explored here, and the novel's emotional ambition is considerably larger than the first. Slower to start; pays off substantially.
Natasha Pulley's Other Novels
Pulley has written three standalone novels outside the Filigree Street world. Each is set in a different historical period and shares the series' preoccupation with time, memory, and the way the past exerts force on the present.
Main Characters
The heart of the series is the relationship between two very different men who are drawn together by a watch that should not exist.
A quiet, observant man from a working-class background who has educated himself into a middle-class profession. Thaniel is not a detective or a hero; he is someone to whom things happen, who notices more than people expect, and who forms attachments slowly and keeps them permanently. His perspective anchors both novels and provides the reader's entry point into Mori's otherwise inaccessible interiority.
The more complex of the two central characters. Mori has the ability to remember the future — specifically, to hold thousands of possible timelines in mind simultaneously and, through small interventions, guide events toward outcomes he prefers. This ability makes him genuinely dangerous: a man who can shape the people around him without their knowledge or consent. Whether he does so benevolently or manipulatively is the moral question both novels turn on. His clockwork creations — mechanical octopuses, automatons — are a physical expression of the ordered complexity he sees in time.
A scientist in an era that did not take women scientists seriously, who is investigating the nature of light and the existence of the ether. Grace is introduced as a potential love interest for Thaniel and becomes something more interesting: a character who applies scientific scepticism to Mori's impossible abilities and arrives at conclusions that complicate the reader's sympathies. She is sharper and colder than either of the male leads, and the first novel is better for it.
What Makes This Series Different
Most historical fantasy set in Victorian England is either cosy — gaslight and magic used decoratively — or it is using the period as window dressing for a plot that could happen anywhere. Pulley does neither. Her Victorian London feels genuinely alien: imperial, class-bound, saturated with the specific texture of 1880s bureaucracy and the particular loneliness of living in a city of four million strangers.
The Japanese influence is not incidental. Mori brings with him an entire philosophical tradition — Buddhist conceptions of time, Japanese aesthetics of transience — that sits in productive tension with Victorian English empiricism. The collision between Thaniel's and Grace's modes of understanding the world (evidence-based, linear) and Mori's (probabilistic, cyclical) is where the series finds its deepest interest.
It is also — without making a performance of it — a love story between two men, written with the same attention and seriousness as any other relationship in the novel. At the time of publication in 2015, this was rarer than it should have been in mainstream fantasy. The relationship is the emotional core of both books.
If You Liked The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
The series sits at a specific intersection of literary fantasy, historical fiction, and slow-burn character study. These are the books most frequently recommended alongside it:
The gold standard of literary historical fantasy. Set in Regency England, two magicians revive English magic — one cautious and academic, one reckless and brilliant. Clarke's footnotes alone constitute a secondary novel. If you love Pulley's density of texture, Clarke is the closest match in the genre.
A competition between two magicians conducted through the medium of an impossible black-and-white circus that appears without announcement. The atmosphere is the point — like Pulley, Morgenstern is more interested in texture and feeling than in plot mechanics. Best read in winter, preferably by a window.
Clarke's second novel: a man lives alone in a house of infinite halls and tidal statues, keeping careful journals about a world he barely understands. Shorter and stranger than Jonathan Strange, and arguably even better. Shares Pulley's interest in a protagonist who is discovering, slowly, that reality is not what they believed it to be.
A dark academia fantasy set in 1830s Oxford, where silver bars inscribed with translated words generate the power that runs the British Empire. Like Pulley, Kuang is interested in the violence concealed inside imperial aesthetics — but where Pulley is elegiac and quiet, Kuang is furious and precise. See all R.F. Kuang books in order.
The first book in the Winternight trilogy — medieval Russia, frost demons, and a girl who can see the spirits her village is trying to forget. The atmosphere is completely different from Pulley's but the emotional approach is similar: character-driven, patient, interested in the texture of a specific historical world and what magic would actually feel like inside it. See the Winternight Trilogy reading order.
Late 19th century New York: a golem made of clay and a jinni freed from a copper flask both navigate immigrant communities while hiding what they are. The closest thing to Pulley's sensibility of "what would a genuinely supernatural being feel in a historical world" — thoughtful, unhurried, interested in questions of free will and identity.
Where to Find Reading Orders
For the complete list of Natasha Pulley's novels in publication order, see her author page. For the Filigree Street series specifically, the series page has every book in order with publication dates.
If you want more historical fantasy reading orders — including Susanna Clarke, Katherine Arden, and R.F. Kuang — each author page has a complete guide to their series and standalones.
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