The Parasol Protectorate

A lady of good breeding must navigate not merely the marriage market but the vampires who dictate its fashions and the werewolves who serve, quite respectably, in Her Majesty's regiments. Gail Carriger's Parasolverse is a steampunk comedy of manners laid over an alternate Victorian Britain where the supernatural has not been driven into the shadows but presented at court, taxed, and invited to tea. The whole conceit turns on the soul: an excess of it may make one a vampire or werewolf, while those born without any — preternaturals — cancel such powers with a touch. Etiquette is a weapon here, and so, frequently, is the parasol. The spine is The Parasol Protectorate — Soulless and its four sequels — attending Miss Alexia Tarabotti, soulless, sharp-tongued, and forever mislaid by polite society. The next generation takes up the running in The Custard Protocol, all dirigibles and dubious foreign expeditions, while the earlier Finishing School quartet enrolls young Sophronia in an academy that instructs in espionage alongside the curtsy. Slighter novella cycles — Delightfully Deadly, The Supernatural Society, Claw & Courtship — furnish the corners of the drawing room. The register is fizzy, romantic, and unrepentantly droll: treacle-tart with a stiletto folded inside. For a newcomer of adult inclination, Soulless is the correct door; the gentler, chronologically earliest entrance is Etiquette & Espionage. Either way, one is advised to bring gloves, and possibly a concealed blade.