AustLit

A continuation of the story told in Song of the Slums, but with an adult focus. Verrol, now an adult and a successful musician, falls in with a young girl who is tied to his criminal past, and who exerts a dangerous fascination for him.

In the great city of an empire that has been at peace for fifty years, the Empress arrives and a rebellion begins.

In city that depends on highly trained singers to keep their clockwork machines in perfectly working order, one such singer, Siri, comes up against a chaos-maker, a man of power who despises the predictability of clockwork.

A rich young woman, disgraced by an affair with a married man and a subsequent pregnancy, is sent by her uncle to the distant hilltop down of Mercury, accessible only by dirigible, where she is to marry a man with his own secrets.

A romp rather in the style of the Raffles stories, P.G. Wodehouse, and the like: follows Preston Featherstone (All-England Monocle-Polishing Champion) and his reliable manservant Bunny, as they discover that Preston's fiancée is a spy.

In a Constantinople under siege, a man with a clockwork heart and steampowered lungs breaks away from his over-protective mother, only to fall into the hands of enemies who are determined to find out how he works.

A sentient doll, created from the skin of a mermaid and of the man who built her, as a token to a mermaid he once loved, is sold to a toyshop when her creator falls in love again. She is sold to a poet, with whom she falls desperately in love. But the poet uses her as a physical substitute for his distant lover, and is not capable of returning her affections–or even of recognising her sentience.

Kate Doolan works as an inventor in Sydney Town, creating and servicing extravagant mechanical creations for the rich. But things take a turn for the worse when her estranged husband, bushranger Jack Doolan, returns to town, asking her to repair the mechanical arm she once made him.

Described by the author as a 'weird steampunk dystopia novelette'.

Source: Author's blog (http://stephaniegunn.com/tag/escapement/). (Sighted: 10/01/2017)