“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
THE BONE LIBRARY — POETRY COLLECTION
The Bone Library examines and interprets all of human life. The poems here respond to broader themes of identity, of place, of love and the unloved. Written in the old Dick Vet Bone Library during the author’s time as writer in residence there, this is a vivid exploration that cuts to the very core of what it is to be alive. It is also a collection that is honest and carries with it, always, an undertow of elegy.
Available in all good book shops, AUTUMN 2022
HEX
A witch will die here in the morning. It is the 4th of December 1591. On this, the last night of her life in a prison cell several floors below Edinburgh’s High Street, convicted witch Geillis Duncan receives a mysterious visitor – Iris, who says she comes from a future where women are still killed for who they are and what they believe. As the hours pass and dawn approaches, Geillis recounts the circumstances of her arrest, brutal torture, confession and trial, while Iris offers support, solace – and the tantalising prospect of escape.
This is the story of Hex by Jenni Fagan, the new volume in Polygon’s Darkland Tales series, which is coming in March 2022. Ambitious, bold, and poignant, it tells a story of one of the most turbulent moments in Scotland’s history, the North Berwick witch trials. In this short novel, Jenni has woven a powerful dialogue between past and present and offers a visceral depiction of what happens when a society is consumed by fear and superstition. She says –
This book is dedicated to Geillis Duncan, a teenage girl — whose torture and execution for witchcraft in 1591 was never just a story
Jenni Fagan
The historical facts of the persecution of women through accusations of witchcraft are all too real. The terrible force of a king’s violent crusade against ordinary women can still be felt, right up to the present day.
Published by Birlinn.
Novels
William Heinemann, 2021
Read more reviews here.
Luckenbooth
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.
“One of the most significant novels of the last ten years. Reverberates and pulses in its own universe and on its own terms.”
Windmill Books, 2016
The Sunlight Pilgrims
It's November 2020 and the world is freezing over. As ice water melts into the Atlantic, and vast swathes of people make for the warmer south, Dylan is heading to Scotland, once the home of his late mother and grandmother.
Twelve-year-old Stella and her survivalist mother, Constance, scrape by in the snowy Highlands, preparing for a record-breaking winter. Living out of a caravan, they spend their days digging through landfills, searching for anything of value. When Dylan arrives in the middle of the night, their lives change course. Though the weather worsens, his presence brings a new light to daily life, and when the ultimate disaster finally strikes, they'll all be ready.
“Fagan’s ability to highlight the extraordinary buried in the everyday is on full display, as is her glorious use of language. A heart-breaking saga of small triumphs against an apocalyptic background.”
William Heinemann, 2013
The Panopticon
“The patron saint of literary street urchins” - The New York Times
Fifteen-year old Anais Hendricks is smart, funny and fierce, but she is also a child who has been let down, or worse, by just about every adult she has ever met. Sitting in the back of a police car, she finds herself headed for the Panopticon, a home for chronic young offenders where the social workers are as suspicious as its residents. But Anais can’t remember the events that have led her there, or why she has blood on her school uniform...
“One of the most cunning and spirited novels I’ve read for years. Tough and calm, electrifying and intent, it is an intelligent and deeply literary novel which deals its hope and hopelessness simultaneously with a humaneness, both urgent and timeless, rooted in real narrative subtlety.”
Poetry
Polygon, 2018
There’s A Witch in the Word Machine
This new book, The Witch in the Word Machine, is a collection that underpins Jenni Fagan’s entire approach to words. Her spell poems are portraits of people, lovers and cities: Paris, New York, Edinburgh, Detroit, LA, and San Francisco. The excerpts of her Truth poem are a political response to great uncertainty in the world right now.
This collection is an exploration of words as spells, incantations, curse and solace.
“I swear by Jenni Fagan as one of the greatest living stylists of the written word.”
Polygon, 2016
The Dead Queen of Bohemia
The Dead Queen of Bohemia is a journey through a life lived on the edge. With a poetic style influenced by Gertrude Stein and William Burroughs, this collection is woven with surrealistic imagery that is both unflinching and dislocating. Fagan's poetry is raw and tough yet beautiful and tender and with themes of loss and recovery, hope and defiance, represents a clarion call from a self-taught poet who started writing at the age of seven and so far has not stopped. The Dead Queen of Bohemia documents the progression of a voice and a life written over the last twenty years. It opens with Jenni's most recent work and includes her previous two collections, both now out of print.
“If you like Bukowski and the Beats, you’ll get somewhere close to the subject matter and style, both of which are pleasingly uncompromising. ‘The Rocks, the Crags & the Sun-Worm’ [selected] captures something of her anarchic spirit.”
Other titles, many of which are limited edition, include:
Truth, a poem in six parts - Tangerine Press, 2019.
Urchin Belle - Kilmog Press, and Blackheath Books.
Impilo & The Acid Burn No Face Man - Bottle of Smoke Press.
The Dead Queen of Bohemia - Blackheath Books.
DWANG II, III - Tangerine Press.
I have been published in The Independent, Granta, The New York Times, Marie Claire, Dazed and Confused, The Scotsman, Flux, Poetry Review Scotland, Ambit, The List, Brand, Gutter, and various reputable anthologies.