Complete Book Series List
Book 1: Of Inklings and Willowpillars
In which Mary Doyle and the Inklings follow Professor Peabody's unreadable map out of a Vanover snowstorm and into the Colorless Kingdoms, where Charlotte sprouts wings, Edgar sprouts fur, Jules is carried off by slavers, and a jilted Woodqueen very nearly acquires a husband — all while the Beast, wearing a borrowed face, goes patiently about the business of tempting one girl into ruin.
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Book 2: Of Portals and the Gloaming
In which Mary Doyle and the Inklings stumble out of the black desert into a blizzard and beg the hospitality of Oenix the Snow Ape, then wade the Poppet Swamps after Jules and the witch who means to devour him, and follow a most courteous Lordling home to the Gloaming — where Mary is asked a question she dearly wishes to answer, and the Beast settles in to hear her say it.
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Book 3: Of Circuses and Teddybears
In which Victoria Weatherby, her daughter Emmeline, and a one-eyed teddy bear named Fuzzles crash their circus wagon into the year 1852 and fall in with a courteous widower called Arthur Peabody, suffering the greed of Enrico the knome king and the appetites of the Sweety King along the way — while a man with a cane and no shadow walks ahead of them, quietly opening doors.
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Book 4: Of Imps and Slaves
In which Victoria and Emmeline Weatherby are taken prisoner in the Woodrealm while Arthur Peabody sails the black sands toward a slaver's fortune, suffering the Woodqueen Alsibet's lust-stone enchantments and the theft of poor Fuzzles' button eyes along the way — until a girl of eleven is left alone in a colorless desert with seven talkative opossums, and the gentleman who was once so courteous comes looking for her.
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Book 5: Of Pearls and Perfection
In which Charlotte and Edgar Precious find a brass compass that opens doors in time, fall in with Arthur Peabody beneath the Black Citadel, and are flung from one misfiring realm to the next — suffering the sabertooths of Priscan, Queen Briseis's bargain for the Pearl of Arion, and the intolerable kindness of the perfect city of Uetopia — while the ledger of every mended thing quietly comes due.
Book 6: Of Labyrinths and Laments
In which Charlotte and Edgar Precious and Arthur Peabody are dropped upon an iceberg at the mercy of Sen Siofa and her white tiger, wander a fog where one battle is fought over and over by men who cannot stop, and are set to labor in the labyrinth beneath Romea for the laurel of Kaiser Flavius — until a cracked compass carries them at last to a staircase belonging to no house at all, where a thieving imp keeps a hoard of doorknobs and one door opens upon home.
Book 7: Of Cherry Blossoms and Lockets
In which Jules Doyle quits Vanover to find his lost Bhellamara, and Bhellamara quits the floating towers of Aenolon to find him — suffering the war-engines of Autonomia, the flawless cruelties of Immacula, and the unceasing counsel of a porcelain doll named Prudence — each passing through the same doors a moment too late, while a veiled woman in white points them, most helpfully, wrong.
8: Of Towers and Graves
In which Jules Doyle is bargained aboard a postal airship to fetch a parcel out of The Salvage, where all lost things fetch up at last, while Bhellamara Bandaloer goes down into a graveyard realm and accepts the hospitality of Mr. Ghastling, who is a most attentive host and does not care for guests to leave — suffering ferrymen, ash-demons, and the long patience of a tower, and coming no nearer one another than the width of a shut door.
Book 9: Of Carnivals and Mazes
In which Jules Doyle reaches Aenolon at last and finds Bhellamara upon the stairs on her betrothal morning, and the two flee together with a pocket watch that cannot be aimed — through the Ringmaster's tent in Arlekhana, the endless maze of Cansania where Mr. Ash serves his papers, and the fires of Eldfall, where a lopsided giant named Molt declines to be finished — and home again to a hearing convened to prove that a girl's love is a symptom.
Book 10: Of Escapes and Traps (Victoria becomes compass)
In which Augusta Clemens, who has spent five years manufacturing ghosts beneath her mother's séance table, is pulled through a portal she cannot account for and falls in with Victoria Weatherby, who is looking for her daughter — suffering a city that burns what it cannot explain, an underground realm where the only door is a holy object, and the patience of a cat-goddess who has been asking herself the same question for three hundred years — until a war delivers them a compass, and a girl of fourteen is left holding it.
Book 11: Of Carpetbags and Playthings
In which Beccah and Lionel, bound by train to their grandmother's, are parted by a carpetbag that is also a door — she to the deck of a pirate ship crewed entirely by animals, and he to the toy-making valley of Spielzeug in the keeping of the sorcerer Malachy — suffering buccaneers, burning clocks, and a village grown frightened of its own playthings, while on a far shore a green-haired girl wakes with no memory and no name but Alsi.
Book 12: Of Keys and Witches
In which Hazel, Harry, and Milly Sommerfield are called upon in their own garden by Ruth Ginny of Mumpus, who rides a goose and keeps a golden key, and follow her up into the cloud-realm of Nuagesa and down into the witch-swamps below — in the company of Norman, a hamster of considerable dignity — suffering witch-ropes, cats made of smoke, and one wish which Milly might have spent upon herself and did not.
Book 13: Of Pixies and Spiderwebs
In which Isadora Batchins goes down an abandoned mine and comes up in Autumnia, where the leaves never fall, and takes up with the pixie princess Aven and with Mr. Fenris, who is not entirely there — suffering the tusks of the Boarkin, the courtesies of a black widow, and the silken towers of Arachopolis — until a careless wish is granted in full by Sere the Birch-Witch, who was a lonely little girl herself once, and a child of ten walks into a spider-queen's hall and surrenders on purpose.
Book 14: Of Rings and Snuffboxes
In which William Wadsworth, a student of the mind, is taught that a delusion is an experience the rest of us cannot share, and meets at the Institute of Malhealth and Mental Aberration a patient called Mary Jay Attlewood, who knows his name — and follows her through a door in three trees to the purple gardens of Mesocolumbo, the bear-ruled village of Chernorus, and the salt wastes of Serpaentia, arriving each time at a different age, and pursued each time by a gentleman who changes his name with the realm and never once takes off his ring.
Book 15: Of Compasses and Silver Ships
In which Edgar Precious is carried off by the fox-faced corsair Maldramas, out of a storybook and into a silver ship, and his sister Charlotte gives chase with Amelia Hawthorne, Benedict Bellamy, and Emmeline Weatherby's tracking rod — suffering the living cards of Cartomantua, the stolen galleries of Velorithe, the kindly dissolution of Euthymion, and the eternal almost-morning of Solasvar — and learning at the last what it is that steers Maldramas's ship, and why it has never once let him arrive.
Book 16: Of Flux and Awakenings
In which the Inklings follow Maldramas into the chaos of Scompoglio, where Benedict Bellamy proves useful at last, and thence to Aekharis, where everything was begun and nothing finished — suffering a Lord of Confusion, a betrayal one of their own has already committed, and the massed weight of ten thousand unfinished things — until a daughter reads aloud from her mother's journal and completes a sentence twenty-three years old.
Book 17: Of Buttons and Silver Roads (Emm/father)
In which Michael Weatherby, seven years a pair of button eyes, is restored to his own hands and sets out with his daughter Emmeline to find her mother — suffering the portrait-manor of Memoravant, which takes back everything it teaches; the Woodqueen's palace and what her scholar wrote down; the silver roads of Argenthis; and the temper of the Empress Selene, who burns their wagon out of pique — and spending twenty years learning how large the polycosmos is, what it costs to stop looking, and where a person ought to stand if she wishes to be found.
Book 18: Of Promises and Holidays
In which Tobias Reed, newly orphaned, makes a small wish on the longest night of 1880 and is answered by two things at once — a warmth and a cold — and is carried a half-step ahead of the Tallowman into the Gloamingrealm, to the cottage of Professor Peabody and his wife Betrany, who had believed themselves retired — suffering the disowned realm where forgotten children are left, three temptations each of which is very nearly true, and a name written down in a notebook decades ago instead of being saved — and learning at the last what your own world's kindest winter story is actually made of.
Book 19: Of Children and the Triptych
In which, in the autumn of 1955, the town of Vanover begins to bleed — six blocks of it slipping for minutes at a stretch into eras it has already finished being — and three children notice: Lil Finch, who keeps a house for a father who is not in it; Tad Greenwell, who has been marking anomalies on a map since April and whose own father walked into a workshop and did not come out; and Elsie March, whose grandmother is only sometimes lucid and is never, in those moments, saying the things grandmothers say. And in which they are found by Sapphira Wren, and shown a great damaged observatory where the realms are counted and where too many of the lights have gone dark; and are given, by Charlotte Precious of Ashworth Lane, three letters written to them by a man none of them has met — who has been watching a lamp burn in a third-floor window since 1849, and who is not yet finished.
Book 20: Of Unraveling and the End of Times
In which Lil Finch, Tad Greenwell, and Elsie March go down at last into the corrupted Vanovers — the city with a wall through the middle of Main Street, the city under permanent ash where every survival suit is painted by the person inside it, the city where an original thought is logged as a processing irregularity — suffering a father found upon the Staircase and not brought home, a guide who does not come back, and three goddesses who have been one grinding creature since 1849 and are now moving toward Vanover to finish it — until an old man stops managing what they know of him, and tells them everything, and is done.
Book 21: Of Vanover and Ber’Ebrin
In which Lil Finch, Tad Greenwell, and Elsie March find a false paradise beneath the Peabody cellar, and in it four souls who have been waiting a very long time to be asked — and carry what those four tell them up to a room in an asylum, where a woman a hundred and seven years dying still holds a locket she was never meant to take — suffering the closing of every realm one by one, a grandmother's last lucid hour, and three goddesses grinding themselves apart on Main Street on an ordinary Tuesday — until there is nothing extraordinary left anywhere at all, and three children walk to school.
