Natasha Pulley’s The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (Bloomsbury, £12.99) proves that well-worn genre tropes – in this case, gaslit steampunkish London and clockwork automata – can be invested with fresh lustre by combining elegant plotting, lashings of invention and jump-off-the-page characterisation. It is the 1880s and lowly telegraph clerk Nathaniel Steepleton finds that his house has been broken into and a mysterious pocket watch left in his bedroom. After he survives a Fenian bomb attack on Scotland Yard, thanks to the watch’s alarm, Nathaniel sets out to track down its maker, and locates the punctilious Mr Mori, the Japanese watchmaker of Filigree Street, who can see into the future. Soon, Nathaniel’s destiny is linked with that of Mr Mori – who he suspects might have had a hand in the bomb blast – and Oxford student Grace Carrow, an oddball who is researching the existence of luminiferous ether. How their stories combine, and how Pulley juggles the complex plot and throws in multiple surprises, are but two of the many delights of a first novel that has been garnering a lot of attention. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is a charming and quietly profound disquisition on predestination, chance and fate.

Another first novel, Skin by Australian Ilka Tampke (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99), blends historical fiction and fantasy to great effect. The setting is Albion, AD43, with the Romans massing for invasion and the Druidic way of life under threat. Ailia is a foundling, left on the doorstep of her tribe’s “cookmother” and raised as a lowly kitchen servant – for Ailia is without “skin”, or knowledge of family lineage, and as such is an outcast unable to marry and, at death, denied passage to the afterlife. We watch Ailia develop into a precociously intelligent young woman, fall in love with the magical Taliesin, and embark on a quest through Celtic Britain and mystical other worlds to find her skin. Skin is a page-turning novel of transcendence and change, personified by the development of Ailia, and set in a time when the magical lore of her people is under threat from inimical outside forces.

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho (Macmillan, £16.99) has been gathering much pre-publicity praise from big names in the field of fantasy and SF, with comparisons to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, the works of Georgette Heyer and even, bizarrely, PG Wodehouse. We’re in Regency England, and Zacharias Wythe, an orphan adopted by Sorcerer Royal Sir Stephen Wythe, takes on Sir Stephen’s hereditary title and becomes the country’s first black Sorcerer Royal. Meanwhile, another orphan, Prunella Gentleman, works for Mrs Daubney in the latter’s School for Gentlewitches. Prunella, ridiculed for her lack of parents by the school’s students, is a wonderful character: pragmatic, competent, with a feisty, can-do attitude. She also has her own powerful magical talent and harbours a desire to escape the school, facilitated by a chance meeting with Zacharias who is on a quest to the Fairy Court. Sorcerer to the Crown is a captivating debut that, aside from examining both gender and racial prejudice, tells an entertaining story with wit and consummate skill.

The Ragthorn by Robert Holdstock and Garry Kilworth, first published in 1991 and winner of the World Fantasy award, appears here in book form for the first time (Infinity Plus, £7.99). The novella recounts Dr Alexander’s quest to trace the legend of the mythical ragthorn tree. In the 1880s his great uncle, scholar and archaeologist William Alexander, brought an ancient stone from Egypt to England and installed it as the lintel in his Yorkshire cottage. Soon after, in the grounds of Scarfell Cottage, the terrible ragthorn took root and encompassed the building. Dr Alexander, like his great uncle before him, is convinced that the tree possesses supernatural qualities, and this powerful novella charts his investigations of a tree that he believes crops up in Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer and the Bible – an obsessive quest that culminates in his search for immortality.

In a change of pace after several SF novels, French-Vietnamese author Aliette de Bodard ventures into the realm of gothic fantasy and manages to create – despite the hoary premise of fallen angels and ancient curses – something startlingly and creepily original. The House of Shattered Wings (Gollancz, £20) is set in a ruined Paris after the devastating Great Magicians war. Fallen angels are divided into Houses that govern the city, though the angels themselves are in great danger from those who value the magical properties of their ground-up bones. We follow four principal characters – a newly fallen angel, an alchemist addicted to angel bones, an immortal magician from the east and the leader of the House of Silverspires – in a suspenseful thriller exploring who might be behind the curse that has brought Silverspires to ruination.

• Eric Brown’s latest novel is Jani and the Greater Game (Solaris).