Praise for Jenni’s work
Luckenbooth
“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. ”
“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, Kitchenly 434
“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, Scabby Queen
“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.” - The Scotsman
“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
“She writes unlike any other author of her generation.”
“An audacious statement and a terrific read. Luckenbooth asserts her right to participate in this most central of Scottish traditions whilst reinventing it for the 21st Century” - Times Literary Supplement
“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
“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.” - The Observer
“From its arresting beginning, in which the devil’s pregnant laughter rows into the Scottish capital to conclude a deal, to its dark, cathartic ending, Fagan’s third novel exerts a powerful grip” - iNews
“A magnificently grotesque Fantasia.” - Metro
“Luckenbooth is seedy, sexy and strange, a haunted house story soaked in booze and bad weather…Luckenbooth is determinedly local. Fagan’s prose is fast and impressionistic.” - The Sunday Telegraph
“[The Panopticon] is 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.”
There’s A Witch in the Word Machine
“For Fagan, writing is a visceral activity, a reconnection with the physical rather than a flight away from it. These are earthy, elemental poems… A powerful collection.” - The Herald
“The sorceress. Striking. Uncompromising. Fagan’s concern is with various forms of outcast, as the shunned and the exorcised. It is also a collection which is frank in marrying properly erotic poetry with an undertow, always, of elegy” - The Scotsman
The Sunlight Pilgrims
“Fierce and clear-eyed. Her images are shot through with lyric beauty. Fagan does not use metaphor as poetic immunity for her characters or her readers. The novel leaves them — and us — in a deeply troubling and unresolved moment. The world looks like a place of our darkest imagination, but it is all too real.” - The New York Times.
“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.” - TOR.com
“Some of the most beautiful and evocative language I’ve read this year. It felt like every chapter ended with a sentence that takes your breath away and as the snow and ice gets deeper and colder Fagan’s descriptions get more poetic, dramatic and amazing." - Jon Page
“Fagan’s keen ear for crackling dialogue that betrays a bittersweet depth. And her imagery is sumptuous. Disarmingly subtle.” - NPR
“As soon as I read the other-worldly first sentence, with its poetic rhythm and sense of impending doom, I had a feeling this was going to be something special. With poignant reminder of not just the fragility of human emotions but of life itself, The Sunlight Pilgrims is a novel about connecting with others…[it] tackles current issues with a haunting, timeless beauty.” - Stylist
“A vivid and tender coming-of-age story set at the end of the world. An immersive and accomplished novel. The characters sing ever louder as the temperature drops lower. For all its coldness and darkness, The Sunlight Pilgrims is ultimately a hopeful book – and for a novel that describes the end of the world, that is quite a feat.” - The Guardian
“Reminiscent of the eponymous narrator of Morvern Callar, and Frank Cauldhame of The Wasp Factory. Indeed, it is somewhere between Alan Warner and Iain Banks that Fagan’s storytelling ability sits, the grit of her familial backstories and dysfunctional relationships dusted with the glitter of magical realism.” - The New Statesman
“I swear by Jenni Fagan as one of the greatest living stylists of the written word.”
The Dead Queen of Bohemia (New & Collected poems)
“Full of desire and guitars and witches.” - The Sunday Herald
“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.” - The Scotsman
The Panopticon
“The patron saint of Literary Street Urchins.” - The New York Times
“Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon (Heinemann) is not just uncompromising and courageous, I think it’s one of the most cunning and spirited novels I’ve read for years. The story of Anais, a fifteen-year-old girl blasting her way through the care-home system while the system in turn blasts her away to nothing, looks on the surface to be work of a recognizable sort, the post-Dickensian moral realism/fabulism associated with writers like Irvine Welsh. But Fagan’s narrative talent is really more reminiscent of early Camus and that this novel is a debut is near unbelievable. 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.” - Ali Smith
“The term ‘stunning debut novel’ doesn’t even begin to cover The Panopticon. Each pages sparkles with the ebullient and sinister magic of great storytelling, culminating in the same impact as the first books of Kelman, Gray and Warner. An utterly magnificent achievement.” - Irvine Welsh
“A brilliant, raw, wonder of a book.” - Matt Haig
“[This book[ is more about unease, set in a slightly futuristic world and told from the point of view of a teenage girl who is taken to a place called The Panopticon. It’s in the Margaret Atwood/The Handmaid’s Tale vein — very literary and suspenseful.” - O – THE OPRAH MAGAZINE
“Written with great verve and brio.. An astonishing debut, I have a feeling that Fagan is a name we will hear more of.” - Jackie Kay
“Ferocious and devastating, The Panopticon sounds a battle-cry on behalf of the abandoned, the battered, and the betrayed. To call it a good novel is not good enough: this is an important novel, a book with a conscience, a passionate challenge to the powers-that-be. Jenni Fagan smashes every possible euphemism for adolescent intimacy and adolescent violence, and she does it with tenderness and even humour. Hats off to Jenni Fagan! I will be recommending this book to everyone I know.” - Eleanor Catton
“The life in Jenni Fagan’s debut novel, The Panopticon, knocked the breath out of me.” - The Observer
“An indictment of the care system, this dazzling and distinctive novel has at its heart an unstoppable heroine. Fagan’s prose is fierce, funny and brilliant at capturing her heroine’s sparky smartness and vulnerability. Emotionally explosive.” - Marie Claire
“To call [The Panopticon] a good novel is not good enough: this is an important novel, a book with a conscience, a passionate challenge to the powers-that-be.”