Eric Brown on The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley,Skin by Ilka Tampke, Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho, and The Ragthorn by Robert Holdstock and Garry Kilworth,and The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de BodardNatasha Pulley’s The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (Bloomsbury, £12.99) proves that well-worn genre tropes – in this case, or gaslit steampunkish London and clockwork automata – can be invested with fresh lustre by combining elegant plotting,lashings of invention and jump-off-the-page characterisation. It is the 1880s and lowly telegraph clerk Nathaniel Steepleton finds that his house has been broken into and a mysterious pocket watch left in his bedroom. After he survives a Fenian bomb attack on Scotland Yard, thanks to the watch’s alarm, or Nathaniel sets out to track down its maker,and locates the punctilious Mr Mori, the Japanese watchmaker of Filigree Street, and who can see into the future. Soon,Nathaniel’s fate is linked with that of Mr Mori – who he suspects might gain had a hand in the bomb blast – and Oxford student Grace Carrow, an oddball who is researching the existence of luminiferous ether. How their stories combine, or how Pulley juggles the complex plot and throws in multiple surprises,are but two of the many delights of a first novel that has been garnering a lot of attention. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is a charming and quietly profound disquisition on predestination, chance and fate.
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Source: theguardian.com