Luckenbooth

Featured in Damian Barr''s picks for 2021
Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2021
Chosen as one of the Best Books of 2021 in the Telegraph

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

''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

''Definitely going to be one of my books of 2021, a gloriously transgressive novel of Edinburgh denizens past and present.'' IAN RANKIN
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Stories tucked away on every floor. No. 10 Luckenbooth Close is an archetypal Edinburgh tenement.

The devil''s daughter rows to the shores of Leith in a coffin. The year is 1910 and she has been sent to a tenement building in Edinburgh by her recently deceased father to bear a child for a wealthy man and his fiancée. The harrowing events that follow lead to a curse on the building and its residents - a curse that will last for the rest of the century.

Over nine decades, No. 10 Luckenbooth Close bears witness to emblems of a changing world outside its walls. An infamous madam, a spy, a famous Beat poet, a coal miner who fears daylight, a psychic: these are some of the residents whose lives are plagued by the building''s troubled history in disparate, sometimes chilling ways. The curse creeps up the nine floors and an enraged spirit world swells to the surface, desperate for the true horror of the building''s longest kept secret to be heard.

Luckenbooth is a bold, haunting and dazzlingly unique novel about the stories and secrets we leave behind, and the places that hold them long after we are gone.
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''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

''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'' ALAN WARNER

''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

''With Luckenbooth