Natasha Pulley Books in Order

If you want the signature Victorian fantasy: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street → The Lost Future of Pepperharrow
If you want historical suspense with uncanny edges: The Bedlam Stacks → The Half Life of Valery K
If you want time-bending alternate history: The Kingdoms
If you want science fiction with romance and politics: The Mars House
If you want myth retold through character and atmosphere: The Hymn to Dionysus

Natasha Pulley was born in Cambridge in 1988 and grew up in Soham, near the Fens in eastern England. That flat, wide landscape feels a long way from the ornate cities, impossible machines, and strange weather of her fiction, but it suits her imagination more than it might seem. Her books often return to isolated places, uneasy borders, and people who feel a little out of step with the world around them.

She studied English Literature at Oxford, then took an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, graduating in 2012. Before fiction fully took over, she taught English in China and also worked in bookselling and publishing. That mix of literary study, travel, and practical book work shows in her novels, which are carefully built but never stiff.

Writing was not the obvious plan.

Pulley has said she once expected to end up in publishing rather than on the author page. At UEA, though, she began pulling together three short stories that eventually became The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. Meeting an agent at a professional workshop helped set things in motion, and the finished novel turned into the book that introduced most readers to her odd, intricate world.

That debut, a blend of Victorian mystery, Japanese history, fantasy, and quiet romance, won a Betty Trask Award. It also established several of the things readers now look for in a Natasha Pulley novel: elaborate plots, tender but offbeat relationships, and big questions about fate, belonging, and identity tucked inside page-turning stories. If you like books that are clever without feeling showy, this is part of the appeal.

Research is one of her engines.

In 2013 she went to Tokyo on a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation scholarship and stayed for about a year and a half, learning Japanese and researching The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. Later she spent time in Peru while researching The Bedlam Stacks, a feverish historical adventure about Merrick Tremayne, cinchona trees, and the edge of the Amazon. Pulley tends to use travel this way, not as decoration, but as a way to understand how setting changes everything.

Her books move around a lot. The Lost Future of Pepperharrow returns to Mori and Thaniel in Meiji-era Japan and turns ghosts, weather, and politics into a knotty historical fantasy. The Kingdoms bends alternate history and time slip into a story about memory, empire, and home. The Half Life of Valery K heads to Soviet Russia for a tense novel built around nuclear secrecy and survival. Then The Mars House jumps to a terraformed Mars and uses science fiction, romance, and immigration politics to ask who gets to belong.

She makes the strange feel lived in.

Pulley now lives in Bristol and teaches creative writing, including work with Bath Spa University and the University of Cambridge's Institute of Continuing Education. By 2025, her fiction had ranged from Victorian clockwork fantasy to queer myth retelling in The Hymn to Dionysus. What connects the whole shelf is curiosity. She likes history that still feels unfinished, systems that leave people out, and stories where love, language, and time can all change shape at once.