All of the books share a world, and you will find connections between them all if you care to look. I’m often asked, “Where should I start?” This page is an attempt to answer that. (I tried to make a chart, but…well, it’s complicated. As you see.)
So, coming soon: a more helpful chart. However, here’s a short(ish) answer to get you started:
If you’ve read zero of my books:
First things first: The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book, being a piece of lore that exists independently within the Roaming World (the shared world of all my books so far), you can read it at absolutely at any time. It connects to every other one of the books, but isn’t dependent on any of them. If you haven’t read any of the others yet, The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book is a great place to start, but you can also read it at any point, fitting it in anywhere you like among the others.
Having said that, my suggestion is to use the sidebar on the right-hand side of this screen as a general guide and begin with either Raconteur’s or Bluecrowne. Work your way straight down the list from top to bottom. It’s not precisely chronological–to be purely which-happened-first about it, you’d go from the nautical books to The Broken Lands, The Boneshaker, and The Kairos Mechanism before finishing with the Greenglass books–but the Greenglass books are the most popular and they’re most deeply tied to the nautical books. It’s a little arbitrary, but it makes sense.
If you’ve read one or more already:
You can apply the same basic idea: just work your way down from where you are and then go up to the top and read any you’ve missed, beginning with The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book or Bluecrowne.
Or ignore the previous advice completely.
Each book is a stand-alone story. I’d definitely read Greenglass House before Ghosts of Greenglass House (though it’s not critical to read either of them before the forthcoming The Thief Knot), and Bluecrowne before The Left-Handed Fate, and The Boneshaker before The Kairos Mechanism (you can read The Broken Lands at any point and you’ll be just fine), but it doesn’t matter if you read the nautical books before the Greenglass books or if you skip all of that and go straight for the darker fare that is The Broken Lands, The Boneshaker, and The Kairos Mechanism.
Which brings me to a small but important caveat: everything else is at least somewhat darker than the Greenglass books. Now, my personal favorites are among the darker titles, but if you started with anything Greenglass you should just know the rest of them aren’t what you’d call cozy. But if you can handle atmospheric, uncanny fantasy with the occasional nods at horror and self-aware metals and mechanisms, you might just love them as much as I do nonetheless.