Prosperity Books in Order

Prosperity is Hall's strangest series on this page, a gaslight steampunk world of flying cities, criminal empires, old secrets, and queer longing. Hall has described the wider Prosperityverse as more connected by world, theme, and character than by one straight plot, which is useful to know before you start. These stories share a setting and a mood more than a single ongoing mission.

The first book, Prosperity, drops you into a lawless skytown in 1863 where fortunes are chased in the clouds and danger is never far away. The hero is Piccadilly, a guttersnipe whose bad decision making lands him in trouble with exactly the wrong people. From there the story opens into airship adventure, crime, strange technology, monstrous threats, and romance that feels as risky as everything else in the world.

Nothing here is subtle, and that is part of the fun.

There Will Be Phlogiston shifts the focus to Lady Rosamond Wolfram and a different corner of the same universe. It keeps the theatrical language and melodramatic energy, but turns them toward social ruin, scandal, and a more aristocratic kind of danger. That change of perspective helps explain what this series is doing. Hall is not just telling one love story. They are building a whole odd, queer, slightly monstrous setting and letting different characters crash through it.

If you like clean category lines, this series will cheerfully ignore them. It pulls from steampunk, adventure fiction, sensation novel melodrama, romance, and something faintly eldritch at the edges. There are airships, clockwork inventions, impossible creatures, and more than one person who really should not be trusted.

Read these books if you want Alexis Hall at their most eccentric. The voice is playful, the world building is busy, and the emotional stakes are sincere underneath all the spectacle. For the right reader, that combination is catnip.