Anubis Gates Books in Order

Tim Powers's Anubis Gates sequence starts with a seemingly straightforward academic assignment and turns it into a labyrinth of time, magic, and identity. In The Anubis Gates professor Brendan Doyle travels from 1980s London to 1810 to lecture on Samuel Taylor Coleridge for a party of wealthy tourists. The trip is made possible by unstable holes in time created when Egyptian magicians tried to call their gods forward to destroy the British Empire. When Doyle is stranded in the past, he discovers that the London of beggar kings, secret societies, and river fog is stranger than any lecture hall.

The novel plays out as a secret history of the Romantic era. Real figures like Coleridge and Lord Byron brush up against Powers's invented poet William Ashbless, body snatching werewolves, and the disfigured clown Horrabin, who rules a guild of beggars from tunnels beneath the city. Doyle's attempts to survive and find a way home tangle him in fixed time loops, so that the history he once studied is now partly his own doing. The result is part adventure story, part puzzle about fate, free will, and how much of a life can be written in advance.

Later pieces return to that world at a more intimate scale. The novella Nobody's Home follows Jacky Snapp, a young woman disguised as a boy and hunting the ghost of her murdered fiancé through haunted London alleys and along the grim Thames. The Properties of Rooftop Air shifts the focus to Isaac Fairchild, a dimwitted member of Horrabin's beggar guild who is offered an alchemical shortcut to genius by joining the hive mind of the tiny Spoonsize Boys. Both stories show new corners of the city while deepening its sense of moral and supernatural cost.

The constant across these works is the feeling that London itself is a living, dangerous machine with gears made of river water, fog, and old poems.

Readers who come to the series can expect dense, rewarding plotting, vivid period details, and a tone that slides easily between horror, farce, and melancholy. You do not need to read the novellas to follow The Anubis Gates, but they reward fans who want to stay a little longer in that haunted version of the nineteenth century.