That said, Pulley’s premise – that modern technology and information about the future slipping back in time and captured by the French gave them the upper hand over the English in the Napoleonic wars is a fascinating counterfactual and plays out well even if the eventual resolution is a little forced. After the future has changed a few times it is probably best not to think too hard about it because the situation is so replete with paradoxes that it will make your head hurt. But she never quite explains why, when the future changes, some people are able to sense the changes, even though this is more of a feeling than anything else. Pulley sets up early why changing the future so that he might not exist will not mean that Joe will suddenly cease to exist. Those who find him, an English pirate called Kite and his sister, hope that his knowledge of the future can help them turn the tide of the French invasion.įirst and foremost The Kingdoms is a time travel story and time travel stories need rules. His finds himself in a position to visit the lighthouse and upon doing so also finds himself back in the year 1807 having been through a gateway that allows passage backwards and forwards in time. Joe goes on living a life that he is sure is not his real life until he receives a postcard, sent 91 years before with a picture of a lighthouse off the coast of Scotland. It turns out that his name is Joe Tournier and he is the English slave of a local Frenchman, the French having conquered England after winning the battle of Trafalgar.

After being escorted to a doctor and then an asylum he is released back to his master.

He is confused, not knowing who he is or what has happened to him but also, sure that this is not the London he remembers. The Kingdoms opens with a man arriving Gare du Roi station in Londres in 1898. Sticking with the steampunk aesthetic, The Kingdoms is an alternate history and time travel story set in the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries.

For her fourth novel she does something a little different but also stays on familiar ground. British fantasy author Natasha Pulley’s first three novels ( The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, The Bedlam Stacks and The Lost Future of Pepperharrow) were set in the same slightly steampunk Victorian era universe.

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley