Thank you to NetGalley and Publisher for this ARC

Jenni Fagan’s Luckenbooth was a wonderful read and I found myself completely hooked right from the start. Fagan writes in wonderful lyrical prose and the repetitive structure of the narrative draws you in completely.
I was worried about the timeline as it starts in a historical time moving towards the present and how the author would tie those pieces together, but I was pleasantly surprised. You will want to step right into 10 Luckenbooth Close and experience the superstition and folklore for yourself.
If you are reading this review stop and buy the book you will not be disappointed.

This ‘building is too many things’ is how one of the inhabitants of 10 Luckenbooth Close, Edinburgh describes it in one of the decades in which the reader visits during the 90 year scope of this novel. In an echoing of Dante’s inferno, here are nine stories of a building in which a realm of horror, destitution, sin, revenge, love and salvation are interwoven. The tenement; the language, including wonderfully realised Scots dialects; and the socio-economic changes in Edinburgh all build a wonderful multi-layer of interest in which newly introduced characters alter the interior of the building over time. Among others we are introduced to Jessie MacRae (the devils’s daughter), Agnes Campbell (medium), William Burroughs (the author), and Ivy Proudfoot (teenage assassin), however, it is the building itself which is the main character which ages disgracefully and by 1999 is is ‘breathing its last shallow breaths’ with only one left to mourn it.

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House, Cornerstone for a review copy.

I love a book that takes me by surprise and is a bit off centre; something a bit different from books found on the bestseller lists (which is where I would hope this will end up!!), or the supermarket shelves. Luckenbooth is one of those books.
Luckenbooth piqued my interest as soon as I saw the cover photo - and then I read the synopsis. How could it possibly NOT appeal to me? I mean, the devils daughter rows to Edinburgh in a coffin to work for the Minister of Culture. I was hooked. It’s not all about her though. The book is split into three sections, each section revolving around three different characters, and we see glimpses in to their lives. There are people from all walks of life: strippers, spies, maids, a black human rights lawyer with a bone mermaid, drug addicts, poets, a medium. These are all people who live on the edge of society (within No. 10 Luckenbooth Close, anyway!), people who have little - and they live in a tenement that has been cursed by the devils daughter.
The stories seem not to be linked to one another, and their only link is the fact that they all live in the same tenement building. I really enjoyed these snapshots, any one of them could have been longer and I would have enjoyed them just as much. This fed my love of short stories though, and I really liked how reality was mixed with the more supernatural elements.
I will have to dig out my copies of Fagans books The Sunlight Pilgrims and The Panopticon, languishing in my Kindle library - this has really made me want to read her other books.
Many thanks to the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book through NetGalley.

Set in Edinburgh over a period of 90 years, It covers the stories of the different inhabitants of a house which starts as a grand residence and ends up as a condemned tenement. Starting with Jessie the devils daughter who arrives in Luckenbooth in 1910. Very quickly she becomes the surrogate to another occupant and his wife and their daughter Hope is born. It is not the easiest read and I found it frustrating that all the stories did not necessarily link up. Nevertheless it is a very edgy read

This is such an utterly strange book and it has given me a book hangover (in a good way!). This is set in Edinburgh where I've lived for the past 7 years so I'm always keen to read stories set locally! It references some specific streets that are near where I live so that was neat.

We're following nine characters who live in the same building, in different flats, over a period of about 90 years. Although this sometimes feels like a short story collection, it does centre around the history of one of the characters, Jessie - the devil's daughter. We start the book as she is travelling to Edinburgh in a coffin on the sea and the story takes off from there.

There were characters whose stories I enjoyed reading a lot more than others. My favourites were Jessie; Agnes, a psychic medium; and Dot - a young woman, down on her luck, squatting in the now abandoned building.

A couple of the characters and stories felt really out of place and I didn't really see the point of them - specifically Queen Bee and William. I felt like I was missing the point with those as they felt so random.

Overall though this is a really interesting and unique book. I couldn't stop thinking about it all night after I had finished it which doesn't happen too often!

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC, in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

I really wanted to love this book after reading all the excellent reviews.
Unfortunately it wasn’t for me. Struggled to reach the end.

This is dire. Pretentious, woke nonsense, full of anachronisms, swearing and sex. Anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-misogyny, gender politics, pandemics - thump it all at the poor reader as if she's too thick to comprehend subtlety. It's like reading Twitter only without the humorous memes. There's the occasional glimmer of good writing, but it's buried under the weight of worthy messages and misandry. Not for me - I'm bored rigid with sweary, sex-obsessed, juvenile ranting and can't wait for contemporary authors to get over their desperately sad compulsion to prove that they're the most woke of all.

Luckenbooth is a collection of stories dripping with superstition and the unspoken connections that bind people to place. Fagan's lyrical prose took a while to grab me, but once hooked I quickly sped through the centuries as the people of Edinburgh emerged before my eyes. The repetitive structure of the narrative - three characters examined three times in the three parts of the novel - draws the reader in, eager to know what will befall the occupants of 10 Luckenbooth Close. As the historical time period moves more towards the present we see the undertones of folklore morph into science and understanding or tolerance. Above all else though, Luckenbooth is an ode to Edinburgh and what is lost as we lose the past through gentrification. Physically buildings crumble and with them the stories they hold through the unspoken past of their inhabitants.
Highly recommend.

This is so much the sort of book I am not usually drawn to – ghosts, the supernatural, the Gothic - but the author writes with such verve, imagination and originality that I was carried along, finding myself more and more engaged as the narrative progressed. Not that I enjoyed all of it as certain episodes just didn’t work for me, not least the section where William S Burroughs is introduced (he really was in Edinburgh in the 1960s) and he is allowed to expatiate at some length on his ideas about language. Interesting from a literary history point of view, I nevertheless felt that overall it didn’t gel with the rest of the book. I also found some of the violence in another episode gratuitous and overdone. However, I raced through most of the book and found it compelling indeed. The novel is set in 10 Luckenbooth Close, Edinburgh, a 9 storey tenement building and takes place over 9 decades. Years of lives and secrets and tragedies merge together as we meet the disparate group of people who have made 10 Luckenbooth their home, not the least of whom is Jessie McRae, the Devils’ daughter, who arrives in 1910.Their varied narratives are woven together into a largely satisfactory whole and present the reader with a tale of outsiders and misfits, much of it based on historical fact. It’s an ambitious work, cleverly written, intriguing and unusual, vivid and atmospheric, and although I have some reservations it was definitely a good read.

I'm sorry, this book did not engage my attention on any level. It did not seem to match the blurb of what to expect. I didn't like the style - which was not particularly coherent. I didn't like the subject matter. I didn't like the characters and felt no affinity with them, nor did I care even slightly what became of them. There were a few points where the descriptive element was very good, but it was not enough to make me want to read more. I was just forcing myself along, and relieved to reach the end.

Not for me.

Thank you to NetGalley, Random House UK, Cornerstone and William Heinemann for allowing me access to the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I was worried this book might carry the conceit of 3 / multiples of 3 too far in a mannered, self-conscious way and occasionally it does seem a tad laboured as you are transported through time and onto different floors of 10, Luckenbooth Close. This is outweighed by the beauty of the language describing Edinburgh and its inhabitants.
Some characters just aren’t likeable, but they aren’t supposed to be. I did skim the William Burroughs sections, for instance, because I’ve never found him interesting or engaging and there was no reason for this book to change my mind.
It works best when it’s allowing the female characters to hold forth on matters of poverty, oppression and patriarchy. However, there are not so faint echoes of other, better authors such as Mantel or Carter and there seems little new or revelatory added to the genre.
A passable diversion, rather less clever than it sometimes thinks it is.

This wasn't what i expected entirely but i did like what it did. I thought that Jessie would have been more of a constant narrative voice throughout this rather than one that you follow in the beginning and appears throughout in various places. I enjoyed the writing and the story telling and thought that the world building made the house and later on the flats, very believable.

You know these books that open with a sigh to let you read them....this is not one of them. This book fights you tooth and nail, slams the door in your face and whaps you...and still you come back for more.
10 Luckenbooth Close is a nine-storey tenement in Edinburgh. Meet its inhabitants and visitors from 1910 to 1999. Even if it is a highly structured plot - flat equals story - you will get lost, you will be left bewildered.
Much as I loved the artwork of the title page, I struggled with the contents.
I struggled as I always do with books written in “stream of conciousness”. As the book’s voices veer from drug-fuelled self-important twaddle to porn to shocking gore scenes to ghost stories, all with gratuitous swearing, I struggle. Trying to connect the tenuous connections between flats and personae, I struggle. I struggle with the register seemingly being the same in 1910 as it is in 1999. There are some brilliantly-painted scenes of Edinburgh landscapes and the inside of some of the tenement flats (my favourite was the attic), but unfortunately that was not enough to keep me hooked.
3* for being...different.

10 Luckenbooth Close in Edinburgh, a tenement witness to and harbour to the darkest secrets of the city. Across the length of the 20th century, the stories are told of residents and their visitors on each floor of the building. As the century progresses, the fabric of the building decays.

These are tales of the poor and marginalised, the rich and corrupt, the criminal and the gifted. These individual tales also reveal a larger narrative, about the duality of Edinburgh and of wider society, the way society (and men in particular) control people's sexuality, suborn women and seek to suppress the imagination. Women are victims in some of these stories but also strong and relentless and creative.

There are moments of horror in these stories and unashamed sexuality. Each story intertwined with others and an act of violence reverberates through the century. These stories are gripping and pessimistic and optimistic and one strand raises ideas about how writing can and has changed the world.

A wonderful novel, massively entertaining and beautifully structured and written.

The high tenement in Luckenbooth Close, which belongs to the unpleasant, two-faced Mr Udnam, is home to a variety of characters during the twentieth century. “Luckenbooth” is an unputdownable, beautifully written, very unusual book which takes the reader through the century by means of sequences of pen portraits of some of these residents and the city in which they live. On the face of it, the book might appear to comprise an eclectic series of interrupted short stories of Edinburgh people in a specific era. However, it is highly structured, thoughtful, and thought-provoking, with important and distinct threads running through the narrative. I’m it sure will repay re-reading; I expect it to be a notable literary success; I hope the inevitable screen-play will do it full justice.
With many thanks to the publisher and to Netgalley for giving me a copy in exchange for this review.

It's 21st January 2021 and I've already found my book of the year. Nothing can possibly top it. Jenni Fagan's "Luckenbooth'' is highly original and intoxicating. I interspersed reading with listening to the audiobook and the cast of narrators is superb. Cathleen McCarron, David McCallion, Fiona McNeill and Jeff Harding have done a stellar job of bringing Fagan's complex and multifaceted characters to life.

Jenni Fagan's prose is poetic, employing a mixture of Scots and English as befits character and situation. In one particularly harrowing scene, there is a passage which likens blood to a crimson gown. I will leave you to discover its specific beauty for yourself. It blew me away. The entirety of the novel is atmospheric. There is violence (sometimes vomit-inducingly graphic) and horror on a par with Stephen King's "The Shining". Historical anecdotes, and references to real people, are scattered throughout - for example Half Hangit Maggie Dickson, who woke up in her coffin! These breadcrumbs sent me down many a Google rabbit hole in the course of reading. Fagan also sprinkles extensive musical references throughout and I shall be checking all of those out too. An accompanying Spotify playlist would be smashing, hint hint!

The book explores the lives of residents of 10 Luckenbooth Close over a 90 year period. Fagan hits every cultural reference point across each decade, demonstrating extensive knowledge and painstaking research. There are three parts to the novel, split into chapters focussing on a specific character, era and floor of the building.

The story opens and closes with Jessie MacRae - the Devil's daughter. At one point, Jessie lists over 30 kickass women throughout history who I absolutely intend to learn more about. She harbours righteous rage towards patriarchal constructs, observing "Men decide what goes in women’s bodies and what is taken out. How and when and in which way things go in and out of them." Personally, I shall henceforth be taking Jessie's Ma's advice of only loving men who "read books and understand them properly."

Next up is the bold Flora who we meet in a pub, thinking about Baska Murmanska - a polar bear who marched the streets of Edinburgh alongside hundreds of Polish soldiers in 1919. This was the first of many Googlings on my part and yes, it really did happen. Flora emits sass and swagger, with a soft centre. She makes some beautiful observations, for example she talks about the light that emanates from human souls and the joy of two souls finding the light between them. There's also a conversation where love is referred to as a "poultice" drawing out madness.

Levi is the third resident we meet - a Louisianian working in Edinburgh's Bone Library (where Fagan herself was once poet-in-residence). Levi makes interesting commentary about the link between horses being tamed and our opportunities for love expanding, as we were able to travel farther afield. Suffice it to say, horses are a bit of a theme for Levi.

In the opening of Part Two, we meet Ivy Proudfoot - a wannabe spy who speaks of women's essential (and often overlooked) contribution to the war effort. She speaks of society's expectations of girls and women and the gentrification of Edinburgh.

Residing in Flat 5F5, spiritualist medium Agnes Campbell is perhaps my favourite of them all. She's disillusioned with her man, Archie, but there's no denying the love between them. I particularly enjoyed their early interaction and dialogue. Through Agnes we meet a swearing parrot and Dora Noyce, a real-life brothel keeper. We also learn a little about Helen Duncan who was the last person imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act. I don't want to give away any spoilers but there is some serious ouija board action that takes place in Agnes' hoose!

American writer and visual artist William S. Burroughs also features in Part 2. He describes language as a "virus" and some of his own is beautifully arresting. There is a quote "Of all the artforms, writing is the most intimate and strange." I can't find a source attributing this to Burroughs so can only assume this wisdom comes from the Fagan stable. I would very much like it on a fridge magnet. We see Burroughs talking with his lover about British colonialism," word travellers" and the weather having a temper. The complex concepts introduced here could fill a book all their own.

Part 3 opens in 1977 with Queen Bee and the Original Founders in a strip club. I found their mask-wearing frankly terrifying. Also, brace yourself for an incident involving Davey and Ali's Da. Its high on the gross and lasting trauma scale. In this story arc, I enjoyed the inclusion of references to Chinese culture and cuisine. The use of pinyin added authenticity and was a nice touch. I remain utterly fascinated by the concept of strippers at funerals!

Ivor joins us at the end of the 80s and subverts our expectations about domestic abuse. His story speaks to the devastating impact of Thatcherism via the AIDS crisis, phobias and deathwatch beetles. His wee niece, Esme, plays with My Little Ponies but is wise beyond her years, with the clarity of vision associated with youth and innocence. For Esme, the veil between worlds is thinner.

The final Luckenbooth resident we meet is Dot. It's Hogmanay on the eve of the new millennium and Edinburgh is heaving. Dot is a shrewd cookie, noting that "people's niceness is so exploitable." She wanders the halls marvelling at the detritus of residents past. Her observations about the Arts are spot on, particularly with regard to the notion of appropriating other people's stories (especially the less privileged). Dot remarks that "Middle-class kids are raised to own a space." In my experience, this pervades educational establishments everywhere. I hope the articulation of this truth causes some readers discomfort and engenders a degree of self-awareness. Dot has equal disdain for humanity's blatant disregard for our planet. I loved her nod to kintsugi and wabi-sabi, in addition to the ekphrasis of Lilith's painting in the hall and Dot's renderings of her.

Laced through many residents' stories like a cancer is Mr Udnam - the man who owns the close. He is said to have "the serenity of a man without conscience" and that's pretty much him in a nutshell. Like all vile men, I do not wish to discuss him further.

Fagan's greatest achievement (with what must surely be her magnum opus) is giving this born and bred Glaswegian reader a grudging, and awed, appreciation of our Scottish capital. There is a great universality to her writing, with representations of a diverse cast of characters. Her work feels inclusive of all, with particular fondness for those on the fringes of society. From Fagan's humble beginnings, for her to have conceived this work of sheer brilliance then published it during the second national lockdown phase of a global pandemic is off the scale in terms of achievements. "Luckenbooth" is a stunning feat of imagination and showcases Fagan's creativity beautifully. If there was a superhero whose special power was writing, her name would be Jenni Fagan.

With thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for an advance review copy.

Luckenbooth is a fascinating oddball of a novel. It is ambitious in structure and sweeping in scope, but ultimately I found it to be rather less than the sum of its parts.

The title refers to a tenement building in Edinburgh, 10 Luckenbooth Close, which is one of the unifying threads in this tale. The other is the city of Edinburgh itself - not the pretty tourist town, but the seedy, steamy and sometimes devilish underbelly just beneath the surface, seen through a series of inhabitants of 10 Luckenbooth Close from 1910 to 1997. A luckenbooth is also a romantic piece of jewellery, described here as a heart held in two hands, which takes on an increasingly ironic significance as time passes.

The novel is highly structured, with three parts each containing nine chapters set in three apartments, and encompassing three decades of the 20th century, rising from the first floor in 1910 to the ninth in 1997. Other than a way of constructing the novel though, this structure does not add anything much to our understanding. The inhabitants and characters we meet range from a secretly corrupt and abusive politician and philanthropist, through a light-phobic miner, a hermaphrodite, a medium and her husband, a bone librarian from the American South, a quartet of gangsters, a disabled squatter, a would-be female WWII spy, William Burroughs (yes, that one), and the devil's daughter. Queer relationships abound and are treated as part of the rich range of human experience. Narrative voices look into the future and speak from beyond the grave, and the events of the first chapter cast ripples far into the future of the building and its tenants.

The problem I had with the novel was that I became less and less engaged as I read on. With so many stories it is perhaps natural that some will interest the individual reader more than others; however, each one was broken up into three parts, with others interspersed between, breaking the narrative flow unnecessarily. I also found the language and use of punctuation distracting. It is mostly written in plain English but randomly breaks out into the Edinburgh dialect without much rhyme or reason that I could see. And the author uses too many exclamation marks, and puts in dashes very randomly too, breaking up sentences in a way that is often not called for and which doesn't do anything to help narrative flow or immersion in the story. The three devices are not consistently associated with, say, direct speech, or stream of consciousness, or anything I could see as a reason. And so it just felt affected, and kept interrupting the narrative flow.

This is undoubtedly a clever and ambitious novel, but by the final third I just wanted it to be over and done with. I suspect it's going to be one that the critics love and that will leave readers quite divided.

Wow, I’m not sure where to start apart from saying that this book must have taken an age to write as it is full of complex characters all living in three different timelines within the same building. The reader will possibly relate to one group of people more than two others but each one adds a very rich layer to this original and deep story.

Everyone's experience of a city is different. As an outsider, I've only ever seen Edinburgh through the limited perspective of a tourist who has visited it numerous times for the famous late-Summer festivals. So it was fascinating to read Jenni Fagan's new novel “Luckenbooth” to see this great, historic city through the perspectives of nine very diverse and intriguing characters who inhabit the same tenement building at different points of the past century. They include a spy, a powerful medium, a hermaphrodite, a coal miner, the madam of a brothel and the beat poet William Burroughs. Though they are individually unique, they collectively embody an economically and socially marginalized side to the city not often seen or represented. Also, threaded through their individual tales is a curse placed upon this tenement building by a woman that was taken here to be the surrogate mother for a wealthy couple who want a child. We follow the compelling tales of all these individuals and, as time goes forward, there's an accumulations of ghosts in this steadily decaying building. Time becomes porous in this place: “It is entirely possible to slip through the decades in between these floors.” There's a creepy gothic atmosphere to this novel as well as sharp social commentary testifying for the disenfranchised citizens of Edinburgh.

The novel is composed of three parts and each part revolves between the stories of three residents who inhabit the tenement building at different times. Once I figured out the structure I was better able to settle into the stories of these characters because without a rigid structure all these tales would have felt too unwieldy. However, there are nine different plots in this novel. Though they all centre around the same physical location and we occasionally glimpse characters from other parts of the book, each story is more or less self-contained. This felt frustrating at times because naturally I felt more engaged by a particular character or storyline over another – yet each tale is only allocated the same amount of fleeting page space. Most sections are intriguing and well written but I wanted to know more. For instance, I wanted more details about Levi, a black man from the American south engaged in the scientific study of bones. I also wished I could have stayed with Agnes who is a true psychic intent on preventing charlatans from practicing because they give her profession a bad name. There's the beguiling secret drag parties in Flora's section and the eccentric musings and theories of writer Burroughs lounging around with his recent lover. I'd have gladly spent more time with these characters rather than switching to the more generic spy-thriller plot in Ivy Proudfoot's section or the crime-thriller plot in Queen Bee's section.

All this meant that by the end of the book I felt like I'd consumed a series of amuse-bouches rather than a fully satisfying meal. Fagan is a talented writer and the more concentrated story of her novel “The Sunlight Pilgrims” made it all the more moving. There is a connecting message between the stories in “Luckenbooth” which is a burning anger on behalf of those who have been marginalized by the dominant society and erased not only from the history of the city but from literally being able to inhabit Edinburgh. A character named Morag comments: “One day nobody will be able to afford to live here but rich people.” I fully sympathised with the overall sentiment of this book and Fagan brings to light many tantalizing historical facts as well as creating many engaging storylines. But sometimes it felt like the author was coming through the narrative too strongly in order to preach rather than let her message be organically told by the characters. This detracted from the building suspense of the resurrected fury of the murdered women at the beginning of the novel who emerge to rattle the walls and seek justice. Fagan refers to the spooky unease she evokes in each section of this book when she writes “On every floor, something is just out of sight.” But the brevity and perhaps overly-ambitious nature of this novel means that the actual reveal is never quite as satisfying as the build-up.

Luckenbooth is marvellous, a literary gothic and a social history of 20th century Edinburgh seen through the eyes of a diverse cast of characters, misfits in their own time. Jessie, devil’s daughter has been sold by her father to Mr Udnam to be a maid to him and his fiancé at 10 Luckenbooth Close, a tall building in Edinburgh’s Old Town in 1910. Things don’t turn out well for Jessie and she curses Mr Udnam and the building itself for generations to come. We follow the building and its inhabitants or visitors over the next eight decades and up to the start of our own century. Among them, a seventeen year old girl determined to fight and kill Nazis in occupied France in ww2; a miner in his late thirties with a sunlight phobia, dealing with the closure of the pits in the 80s as well as his failed marriage; a transvestite attending a secret ball at the apartment of her married lover in the twenties and a 1970s Edinburgh gang confronting a rogue Chinese Triad. Ghosts haunt the building and its tenants while deathwatch beetles slowly but surely tunnel through and eat its timbers.

The novel is divided into three parts, each part covering three decades and three storeys of the building going up and is told by residents living in those flats. The residents themselves don’t exactly belong, they are the other, different – for their sexuality, race or beliefs and there is a lot about social history and acceptance as well as the social history and changes of the city. I thought the structure of the book worked beautifully and I’d love to have seen the plan of the building Jenni Fagan had on her wall while writing (as told to an interviewer in The Observer).

I found Luckenbooth impressive, original and inventive, not easily classifiable into genre and better for it. Highly recommended.

My thanks to Random House UK, William Heineman and Netgalley for the opportunity to read Luckenbooth.