Illusionists Books in Order

The Illusionists series follows a tight knit circle of performers and outsiders who build a theatre from almost nothing, and then live with the rewards and costs of that dream. Across the two books, the Palmyra in London grows from a rundown music hall into a place where lives, loves and ambitions are made and broken under the gaslights.

In The Illusionists the story opens in 1870, when London is a dangerous city for anyone without money, especially a young woman like Eliza Dunlop. Working as an artist's model, she meets Devil Wix, a gifted but ruthless showman determined to own his own theatre rather than scrape by on small time stages. Devil joins forces with Carlo Bonomi, a sharp tongued dwarf with a genius for sleight of hand, melancholic wax sculptor Jasper Button and a Swiss inventor obsessed with lifelike automata.

Eliza becomes the last piece of their strange little troupe, an aspiring actress whose warmth and determination hold the group together even as rivalries deepen. She falls in love with Devil while Jasper quietly loves her, and their tangled relationships unfold against a backdrop of card tricks, grisly stage illusions, backstage feuds and the hard graft of turning the shabby Palmyra into the East End's must see theatre.

The theatre itself feels like another character, full of sawdust, smoke and shadow, a place where illusions can be beautiful, profitable or deadly.

Daughter of the House moves the story into the early decades of the twentieth century and into the life of Nancy Wix, Devil and Eliza's daughter. Nancy grows up in dressing rooms and galleries, half at home in the theatre and half apart from it. As a child she survives a pleasure boat disaster that awakens unnerving clairvoyant visions, glimpses of deaths and a coming war that she barely understands.

As Nancy reaches adulthood in a world scarred by the Great War, she finds herself drawn into the fashionable world of séances and spiritualism, where grief and showmanship blend uneasily. A chance meeting with a charming young man offers escape from the life she thinks she is destined for, but his secrets force her to decide whether to trust him or rely on her own gifts. Her struggle to protect both her family and her independence gives the second book its spine.

Together the novels blend historical detail, backstage intrigue and slow burn romance with questions about illusion and truth. They move from cramped East End alleys to the changing London of the new century, touching on class, gender and the ways performance can liberate or trap the people who live by it. Readers who enjoy immersive historical fiction with theatres, magic and a thread of the uncanny will find plenty to sink into here.