Luckenbooth

A deeply powerful, compellingly vivid novel ... LUCKENBOOTH is a major work of Scottish fiction - possibly one of the most significant novels of the last ten years ... [A] forceful work of fiction to energize a somewhat diffuse, uncertain and often self-congratulatory fictional landscape ... What is so significant about the novel is its instinctive, vatic, lyrical, occult power ... A poetic novel which reverberates and pulses in its own universe and on its own terms.

Alan Warner

It's extraordinary. Make sure it's on your radar ... Definitely going to be one of my books of 2021, a gloriously transgressive novel of Edinburgh denizens past and present.

Ian Rankin

One of the most stunning literary experiences I've had in years. LUCKENBOOTH, sprawling the decades with its themes of repression and revenge, brings back something that has long been lacking in the British novel: ambition. If Alasdair Gray's Lanark was a masterly imagining of Glasgow, then this is the quintessential novel of Edinburgh at its darkest.

Irvine Welsh

Over time, 10 Luckenbooth Close sinks from grand residence to condemned squat with secrets seething in its walls ... Luckenbooth is a place of compacted time, where the past manifests as unquiet ghosts and the future bleeds into the present ... There's a force in Luckenbooth's bizarre assemblage.

The Times

With Luckenbooth, [Jenni Fagan] gives us nine of Edinburgh's wildest and loneliest misfits ... Piles on claustrophobia and menace ... As we move between the characters' perspectives, gritty realism takes over from the gothic. This isn't fancy Edinburgh: at No 10 it's cigarettes, cocaine and Benzedrine for breakfast ... There are memorable creations ... Fagan's prose is poetic, high-octane, built on punchy sentences. Arresting descriptions of the city and its weather abound. This is not a novel that lacks energy.

Sunday Times

Jenni Fagan's Luckenbooth reminded me of one of my favourite novels, Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual. Set in an Edinburgh tenement, it leaps across decades to tell the story of the curse that haunts No 10 Luckenbooth Close and its eccentric inhabitants.

Alex Preston, Observer

Structures and structuralism obsess Jenni Fagan. Those obsessions intertwine spectacularly in Luckenbooth, her third novel, about an Edinburgh tenement and the curse that haunts it, infecting the lives of all who live across the building's nine floors over nine decades of mystery and uproarious change ... Melding the poetic, the esoteric and the occult with the grit and grime of a real life lived on the edge, she writes unlike any other author of her generation, in no small part because she has lived a life unlike any other author.

Scotsman

Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan is the queer witchy revenge horror I had no idea I needed. Every word perfectly chosen. Absolutely outstanding writing, stretching through nine decades, with a soul as back as the centuries of soot on an Old Town brick.

Kirstin Innes, author of Scabby Queen

From its arresting beginning, in which the Devil's pregnant daughter rows into the Scottish capital to conclude a deal, to its dark, cathartic ending, Fagan's third novel exerts a powerful grip.

iNews

Luckenbooth is an ode to Edinburgh's crumbling Old Town, but as ever with Fagan the supernatural underlies everything within its pages. It would be easy for a novel like this to feel disjointed, but the sense of place and the presence of something other throughout make the transitions of time and character effortless. No 10. Luckenbooth Close itself may be the novel's beating heart, but something darkly mystical flows through its veins.

The Skinny

If this addictive slice of Edinburgh Gothic isn't on all prize lists, there is no justice.

iNews

A whirlwind of a novel, and I am certain that various labels will be attached to it - Caledonian magic realism, tartan gothic, something nasty in the shortbread tin, Angela Carter in a kilt cross-hatched with safety pins. What it is, is radical and profoundly fabulist. It is about the stories we are told and whether there is the possibility of there being new stories ... There is a great deal of imagination and empathy at work here. The structure of the building acts as a kind of framework to contain the pent-up furies ... Luckenbooth is a daring book, and beautifully written.

Scotland on Sunday

Luckenbooth is seedy, sexy and strange, a haunted house story soaked in booze and bad weather ... Fagan's prose is fast and impressionistic.

Sunday Telegraph

Luckenbooth, the third novel from the bracingly good Scottish writer Jenni Fagan, defies any sort of neat description ... A clever fiction scaffolded on to just one such place: the tenement at 10 Luckenbooth Close...Terrible and extraordinary things happen here over the course of the 20th century ... Fagan switches effortlessly between dreamy prose and a more dynamic style ... Fagan is unflinching in her depictions of derangement and death but Luckenbooth is compelling and often darkly funny ... Her storytelling has an urgency and - to use an overused but apt word - authenticity. That is not to say that the work is "gritty" or "down-to-earth": there is a fantastical bent to this writing, and the authenticity is in the feelings, in the way the characters' stories are propelled forward and told with respect. The strong sense of person and place includes the wider city, a constant and untamed living presence ... Fagan corrals demons, spies and famous writers (William Burroughs among others), mediums, misfits and outcasts. Ten Luckenbooth Close both contains them and liberates them, as they live and die and maybe even lurk forever, somewhere in the mysterious world beneath Edinburgh's beautiful streets.

Financial Times

Luckenbooth, is driven by a slower-burning rage that set in four years ago ... But if Number 10 Luckenbooth is intimate with hell, it has also known gaiety ... With its mixture of the physical and the spectral, of historical characters and fictitious ones, the novel is a psychogeographical portrait of Edinburgh itself, as perceived by a writer who has loved it since she first arrived there ... In common with her two previous novels, Luckenbooth holds close to its heart characters who are socially and sexually marginalised.

The Guardian

A magnificently grotesque fantasia.

Metro

Like all great Gothic works, Luckenbooth deals in duality: good/evil, light/dark ... Fagan comes at Edinburgh like a voracious lover, eager to explore both its conspicuous beauty and its secret places ... Fagan's writing sparkles most when she is describing landscape ... Luckenbooth is a horror story, originally and beautifully told.

The Herald

[Fagan's] sinuous, supernatural story unwinds down nine decades ... Her narrative weaves between the real and the spirit world.

The Times, Scotland

An exuberant, raucous book.

Bookmunch

Brilliantly strange ... From the start, Luckenbooth gives the feel of a legend or fairy story ... Time periods slip about, gleefully penetrating one another. A multistorey horror story reveals itself obliquely in fragments across a number of years and viewpoints, weirdly paced, the action rushed and breathless, generalised, then freezing for a moment on an unexpected scene or event ... Everyone in the novel is a chimera of one sort or another, caught between forms, illuminated from inside by the light of their own unkempt ideas and desires ... Fagan's booth of stories - her Cornell box of frenzies, tragedies and delights - offers the present moment in the endless war between love and capital. It's brilliant.

M. John Harrison, Guardian

Masterly ... A lesser writer would struggle to control this cacophony of voices but what marks out Luckenbooth is the fierce intelligence driving Fagan's tale ... This is a mad god's dream of a book - it deserves to be shortlisted for every prize going this year.

iNews

Impossible to adequately describe this extraordinarily inventive novel. You'll just have to read it yourself. Early days, I know, but suffice to say this one's already heading for my books of the year list together with both my Women's Prize for Fiction and Booker Prize wish lists.

A Life in Books

Luckenbooth is a compulsive study of our entanglement with place and each other. Brimming with character, subversion and decadence, Fagan builds a striking portrait of the Scottish city's deep-seated repression and toxicity and the grand strength of its inhabitants as they push the city into a modern age. An exhilarating, courageous story of the need to expose the evils of our communal past, Luckenbooth is nothing short of a masterpiece.

Christina Spens, Irish Times

One of the hottest titles right now, Jennie Fagan's Luckenbooth has won all round acclaim.

Edinburgh Evening News

The novel unfolds like a set of dark short stories, with a different character narrating or guiding each one. But there's a twist: Luckenbooth is not just haunted by the realities of time and history, but also by the strong musk of the gothic imagination ... Thickly worked and carefully assembled, the novel functions as a claustrophobic chiller and as a testament to lives led beyond the margins and in the shadows.

Bidisha, The Observer

A novel for readers with sophisticated tastes.

Fantasy Hive

Luckenbooth ... is littered with lines like this. The sort of lines that demand to be read and reread: splendid in isolation, electric in combination. Fagan writes with drama. She can pick out the fine detail, in neat brush strokes, no doubt, but it is in drawing her arm back and attacking a story with great, sweeping lyricism that she propels Luckenbooth forward, dragging the reader through the 20th century, as experienced by a compelling cast of characters.

Buzz Mag

Slips and slides through layers of history, tears in the fabric of time and a series of strange shape shifting characters - it's a wonderful work that is a trip into a spectral interzone but also staged in a warped reality - great writing and a major talent.

John Robb, Louder Than War

Uniquely gripping visions of the hidden social, economic and spiritual forces at play in 20th-century Edinburgh.

Morning Star

An audacious statement and a terrific read.

Michael Kerrigan, Times Literary Supplement

Dazzlingly ambitious.

Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain, The Week

As sexy and horrifying as any fairy story, it is a book concerned, not only with a structure, but with structures: alphabetical, architectural, societal, what they are built upon and how they crumble

Bella Caledonia

Prize-winning author Jenni Fagan does not disappoint with her latest novel, Luckenbooth, which is easily her most compelling yet. In her usual poetic style, Fagan tells of a nine-storey Edinburgh tenement just off the Royal Mile that is creaking with secrets. Throughout this haunting novel, characters' secrets and memories live on in the howling gales of the spirit world, desperate to re-enter their lives. The narrative takes us through eight decades - from 1910 to 1999 - working its way up all nine floors of the building in hopscotch fashion, allowing for an intriguing interpretation of 20th-century life in the capital. Prepare to be transported into a Fagan's weird and wonderful imagination. It is a whirlwind read and one that I could not put down until the final page had turned.

Scottish Field

As sexy and horrifying as any fairy story, it is a book concerned, not only with a structure, but with structures: alphabetical, architectural, societal, what they are built upon and how they crumble.

Bella Caledonia

An Edinburgh tenement building is haunted by tall stories and unnerving strangers, from William Burroughs to the devil's daughter, in this weird and wonderful gothic confection.

Guardian

Her "world building" is highly effective, and each character fully inhabits their decade. Fagan's writing is anchored in societal issues, the wrongs done and the ways individuals have challenged those wrongs and asserted their individuality and sexuality in ways that might make them seem misfits, outcasts. Fagan certainly pulls no punches and is determined that these passionate, authentic stories should not be confined to the periphery.

Historical Novels Review

A deliciously weird gothic horror

The Washington Post

An ambitious and ravishing novel that will haunt me long after

The New York Times