Natasha Pulley may be a new author, but THE WATCHMAKER OF FILIGREE STREET certainly doesn’t read like a first book. To put it simply, it’s fresh and all-around wonderful.

Thaniel Steepleton is a telegraphist at the Home Office of Scotland Yard. He is good at his job but doesn’t find the work exciting. In fact, his life isn’t particularly exciting either. He walks the same route to work every day and completes a very similar routine. Then he walks home on the same route, has a familiar dinner and goes to sleep. One day, after what he expects to be one of his regular clockwork days, he comes home shaken to his sparse room, newly clean and tidy, with a package waiting for him on his bed. He is left wondering who would have broken into his room, cleaned up and left him a gift; not the regular motive of a criminal is his first thought. In the box is a watch, a quite intricate and expensive-looking one at that. But what he doesn’t know is that this special watch is going to change his life in ways he never could have imagined.

"THE WATCHMAKER OF FILIGREE STREET is an amazing debut that you will want to discuss with friends over many cups of tea. Even non-fantasy fans will find this book to be an outstanding read."

Grace Carrow is not your typical woman from London in 1883. She has short hair, frequently dresses like a man to sneak into the library at Oxford so she can read scientific books without a chaperone looking over her shoulder, and is a scientist looking for proof that the ether exists. She fights any attempt at even a hint of femininity in her everyday life and any social convention where being a woman doesn’t get her what she wants. The chance meeting she has with Thaniel at a foreign officer’s event is probably not by chance, but neither she nor Thaniel can understand the strange circumstances or the one person that brings them together --- a Japanese watchmaker named Keita Mori.

Mori is a Japanese immigrant with special skills that help him not only to imagine and create but program the inner mechanisms of mechanical things, such as very fancy and intricate watches. His pet octopus, mechanical of course, is a perfect example of his amazing abilities. It’s his other special skill, though, one that even fewer people possess --- the ability to predict the future --- that sets him apart and simultaneously puts him right in the middle of everything.

While Mori may be the tie that binds all the characters together in this story, he is also by far the most fascinating. His abilities are spectacular in many ways, but he is so subtle about how he handles the advance knowledge he possesses that it would be easy to overlook everything as mere coincidence, which is what’s so mesmerizing about the character. Pulley takes readers on a strange journey in the way her characters develop, adding a touch of fantasy to a steampunkish Victorian London. Thaniel and Mori are lonely souls looking for friendship. Grace, in her way, is also searching, and not just for the ether she suspects is all around her, but for someone to understand her need to be who she is in all aspects of her life.

THE WATCHMAKER OF FILIGREE STREET is an amazing debut that you will want to discuss with friends over many cups of tea. Even non-fantasy fans will find this book to be an outstanding read.