Praise for Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon:
Description
A bold, haunting, and startlingly unique novel about the secrets we leave behind and the places that hold them long after we are gone, a “quintessential novel of Edinburgh at its darkest.” (Irvine Welsh)
There are stories tucked away on every floor of 10 Luckenbooth Close
1910, Edinburgh. Jessie MacRae has been sent to a tenement building 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, 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 as 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.
Reviews
Shortlisted for The Desmond Elliott Award; Shortlisted for The James Tait Black Prize; Shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize
“Fagan has created a feisty, brass-knuckled yet deeply vulnerable heroine, who feels like sort of a cross between Lisbeth Salander and one of Irvine Welsh’s drug-taking Scottish miscreants. Her novel is by turns gritty, unnerving, exhausting, [and] ferocious. A deeply felt and genuinely affecting novel.”
“Fagan has given us one of the most spirited heroines to cuss, kiss, bite and generally break the nose of the English novel in many a moon. Her prose beats behind your eyelids, the flow of images widening to a glittering delta. Vive Jenni Fagan, whose next book just moved into my ‘eagerly anticipated’ pile.”
