This mad, inventive kaleidoscope of a novel stretches right across a century of lives lived in one house: 10 Luckenbooth Close.
It tells a tale for each decade but they are linked by its original occupant, Jessie MacRae, the devil’s daughter.
The stories are sometimes vicious and violent, sometimes tender and passionate, but each is beautifully constructed and written.
The characters are striking too - each is unique and we see many types of person and love.
You also feel the author’s love for Edinburgh in which the novel is set: it is it not always pretty but you get such a real sense of it.
This is a hard novel to describe because I’ve honestly never read anything quite like it.
But if you love magical realism, gothic drama and outstanding writing, I’d wholeheartedly recommend reading this.

In some ways this is more like a collection of short stories with a theme than a novel but it was interesting nonetheless. Not for the faint hearted.

This book is set in an Edinburgh tenement building. It begins when Jessie (the Devil's daughter) is meant to have a baby for a rich couple. This doesn't work out as planned and Jessie lays a curse on the building which reverberates through the 9 storey building and influences the lives of all who live there over time.
Essentially it's asset of short stories only united by the curse. The characters are diverse in personality, sexuality, job, age and everything else besides. By its nature a reader will find some stories more interesting than others.

The structure reminded me a bit of Cloud Atlas but without the links between the stories.
The author has that Edinburgh Gothic horror that you find most famously in Dr Jekyll. However it also has the eerie feel of Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
It does demand a reader's concentration to piece together the different strands of the story but rewards with that Scottish Gothic feel.

A fearsome, multi-streamed, gothick narrative in which the titular house and, by extension, the Old Town of Edinburgh, serves as the main vehicle for the action (Much as in Shirley Jackson's 'Haunting of Hill House', or Nigel Kneale's 'Minuke'). Murder, haunting, secrets, Bluebeard-type characters and the Devil's daughter make for a fine contemporary grand-guignol.

Thanks to Random House / Cornerstone and NetGalley for this ARC

This is the story of 10 Luckenbooth Close, a tenement building in Edinburgh that's been cursed by the Devil's daughter. We follow the lives of its inhabitants over the course of a century from the perspectives of nine different characters and in three parts. Some parts worked better than others - the middle section featuring William Burroughs was a real slog - and it seemed to me that a lot of the writing was done purely for shock value so it came across as a bit infantile. Having said that, other parts were brilliantly written and one simple sentence in particular bloody terrified me, so swings and roundabouts.

This is a wonderful Gothic tale about a run down tenement building in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland.  Over the course of almost a century we meet many tenants at 10 Luckenbooth Close, a 9 storied building of apartments.  The first of those tenants is Jessie, the devil's daughter, a young woman who sails into Edinburgh in a coffin built by her father.  And although Jessie only lives at apartment 1 on the first floor of 10 Luckenbooth Close for a few short years her presence is felt in the building for a very long time.  10 Luckenbooth Close is in some respects a 'haunted' house, and it is not only Jessie who hangs around much longer than she should.  Over the years the different tenants and the events in their lives in the building leave their own mark on the place and filter down, or perhaps up, to affect those who take up residence in the following years.
Many people who know Edinburgh will tell you that it is steeped in an eerie atmosphere, and is a perfect setting for a book like this.  I really enjoyed Luckenbooth and would certainly recommend it.

Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan is a weird, twisted novel set around a tenement in Edinburgh over a period of roughly 100 years.

As the book moves through time it tells the tale of some of its residents. Are they haunted or the ones doing the haunting? seems to be one of the questions that the book asks as time slips by. Is the building possessed by the Devil, who then creeps into the lives of the people who come to live there?

It's a tricky book to label or categorise and it will probably be a bit of a Marmite book for people, love it or hate it. I loved it, but I don't think many of my friends would thank me for recommending it to them. I had a Pan's Labyrinth feel about it, so if you enjoyed the film or the book of that then Luckenbooth will appeal to you.

The prose is lovely and really brings the building and its uniquely strange characters to life. I hadn't read any of Jenni Fagan's books before but I will definitely read more of her stuff now.

I felt this was a little unusual book. I felt it was a little disjointed. Having said that I enjoyed it. Set in Edinburgh where I was born and bread. Engaging and a little weird at times. It was a very different read to the books I usually read but it was different in a good way. 10 Luckenbooth Court is not somewhere I would want to live.

No. 10 Luckenbooth Close is described as 'an archetypal Edinburgh tenement', however, in the hands of the highly original and talented Jeni Fagan, it's anything but....We follow the journey of the tenement over a nine decade period and witness the depravity and mayhem of the world within its very walls. Early on in the story, something terrible occurs and this 'curse' infects each story, as the original horror haunts every inhabitant, seeking salvation. This was a compelling read and Fagan is an imaginative and skillful storyteller. I loved it.

Another brilliant read from Fagan right from start .. introduction of eeriness and compelling voice that develops into ghoulish but diverting story .. excellent .. she is really terrific ..

Luckenbooth is undeniably a 5/5 stars. It is quite a short novel, but it contains multitudes in it. Fagan makes it possible by exploring and describing the life of different individuals over eight decades in the same building, 10 Luckenbooth Close. Each character has its own distinctive voice, I feel that you notice the difference particularly with the William Burroughs’ sections (yes, the beat poet), as the author tries to mirror poetic language and the drug-induced exhilaration.

This novel is also an ode to Edinburgh, capturing its gritty and dirty soul. The streets and places described here are far away from the city built around a prestigious university. They are its bowels, wet with rain and smelling rotten [the Edinburgh I prefer!]. IT doesn’t waste time on mile-long descriptive passages to convey this image, partly because Jenni Fagan doesn’t really need to do that to make us plunge into her world. It takes only a few carefully selected worlds.

The prose is magnificent, short description, carefully selected words, beautifully constructed sentences. There are some moments of experimentation with style, especially in Bill’s chapters: “A relentless octopus of free though to descend all depths. Gain incandescent light! Grow more pods. Become a deity with sharp tiny teeth”.

Fagan is also not shy when it comes to diversity, as all her character are outsiders in different ways. She narrates of two WLW relationships, as well as multiple chapters narrated from the point of view of a Black man studying in Edinburgh in the 40s. As well as the sections narrated by Flora, a hermaphrodite.

The novel is pretty much solidly set in the gothic tradition, successfully reshuffling all the gothic tropes I love the most: storms and thunders, a dark city, a high old building not unlike a castle, and the supernatural.

I would personally recommend this book, it’s possibly one of the best ones I have read this year. I am an aficionado of the gothic genre so this was very much up my street, but if you are not bothered by any of the trigger warnings I mentioned above, I would say make this your next read.

This is a series of short stories with beautiful writing, they are weird but interesting. I wish the stories connected under a theme though.
thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

It's a weird book. I found it fascinating, irritating, well written.
It's a series of short stories, sometimes you find easy to feel how they are related but sometimes it's quite hard.
I loved the style of writing and I think you can love or hate it.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Luckenbooth is not only set almost entirely in Edinburgh it also travels through quite a long time period. The book opens with Jessie travelling to a tall house on Luckenbooth Close, on the face of things to work as a maid for an important man but, in fact, to bear a child for him and his barren wife. So far, so typical a story of Edwardian social mores, but then it transpires that Jessie claims to be the devil's daughter, travels from the Scottish coast to the port of Leith in a floating coffin and must take care to hide her horns from the world. What happens to her, her daughter and her master's wife leads to a sort of curse falling on the building itself - a curse we explore through the lives of the men and women who live on the nine floors of this tenement over the next ninety years. The mix of social history, people with lives full of joy and pain and downright strangeness is quite heady - if you like any of those thing individually you may enjoy this. If, like me, you like all of them you'll probably love it!

An odd collection of short stories. I kept reading waiting for the thread to tie them together but unfortunately was left wanting.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for the ARe-copy in exchange for this honest review.
This is a rich, gothic, visceral series of connected vignettes depicting humanity at its worst and best. This epic novel is a collection of compelling fable-like moralistic tales woven together around a tenement building in Edinburgh on Luckenbooth Close. Covering themes reaching far and wide surrounding women's empowerment, retribution, sexual identity, race, social issues, spirituality... this book skillfully covers a lot, but not at the expense of vivid plot and multifaceted characterisation. This book is very graphic and is not for the fainthearted, but is powerful in its imagery and message and will stay with me for a long time.

Phenomenal. One of the best books I've read this year. Jenni Fagan brings her matchless ability to make her setting a character in its own right to build a whole world within the walls of tenement of 10 Luckenbooth Close. She follows characters through the 19th to the 21st centuries, illuminating the lives of outsiders and the disenfranchised. There's a fae mood to the writing so that it reads like a fairy story for the modern day, creating characters that seem like figures from folk tales but flesh and blood. It's dark and winding like the narrow streets of the Old Town and the narrative skips and jumps and only slowly coalesces but the feeling of place holds it all together beautifully. It's a complex and fabulous read.

I received an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, Random House, and the author Jenni Fagan.
This was a very strange one! While I can appreciate the skill of the author and the engaging way the novel jumped to different stories, characters and time periods, there was something about it that just didn't really gel.
Some parts were much more engaging than others and the author seemed to get too wrapped up in hyperbole. At times it was all just a bit too much.
Mixed feelings here, a lot of potential but a lack of direction and focus. 3 stars.

Strange but fascinating.
A large tenement in Edinburgh., home to murders, devils, mediums unhappy and displaced people.
Lots of descriptions of Edinburgh and its history.
Short stories with lots of characters woven together, starting with the love of two women and their child, it is told over time with the gradual decline of the building a crucial part.
Everyone seems to suffer in the haunted environment.
Difficult to remember who is who, lots of violence and cruelty, not a comfortable read..

An imaginative and atmospheric collection of stories that lacked consistency and novelty.

10 Luckenbooth Close is an eery, cursed building that, over the past century, has housed a host of colourful characters. This includes the devil’s daughter, a trainee spy, a beautiful hermaphrodite, a man with a phobia of the sunlight, a notorious gang, a poet, a medium who speaks to spirits and a man who tries to hide his sins behind money and charity. All their stories influence each other and intertwine over the years, contributing to the rich and dark history of Luckenbooth. This collection of short gothic stories interspersed with each other take the reader through a hundred years of life in Edinburgh and culminate in events set in motion many decades before.

This was a unique book, unlike anything I have come across in a long time and will certainly stick in my head for a while. The author clearly has both an incredible imagination and a complicated love-hate relationship with the city of Edinburgh, which comes across in the pages of this novel. In a way, it felt as if Edinburgh itself was a character in this story, and I learnt more about its complexity and dark side than I had ever imagined. Some of the stories were truly engaging and memorable, and the characters they centred around were unusual and complex. I particularly enjoyed the story of Jessie McRae, the devil’s daughter and that of Queen Bee, the gangster. The author also uses some original and clever metaphors to make some astute observations about contentious issues, and several of the mini-stories and their central characters are thought-provoking and challenge the reader to think about things in a different way.

Despite the above, I regret to say that I did have quite a few issues with this story, mostly centring around its pretentiousness. A lot of the writing seems to be trying extremely hard to be ‘ground-breaking’, yet lots of the ideas it presents are not new or particularly revolutionary at all. I agree with most of the author’s values but being told things like ‘the patriarchy oppresses women’ or ‘people are made of stardust’ over and over again just feels patronising and reactionary and did make me dislike the story. In particular, the William Burroughs sections where he rants in a lengthy monologue about ‘language is a virus’ felt as if they were meant to be read as a radical and progressive view of the world, but it just felt unoriginal and lazy as well as uninteresting (at times I even found myself thinking “get a job” about the poet). As well as this, I found myself occasionally struggling to know what information about which characters I needed to remember as it would end up being important later, and what parts were more standalone and didn’t get referred to in later parts of the story, which hampered my enjoyment somewhat. Finally, I noticed a few times that the author slipped up in her timings – for example, a character from a section set in 1999 refers to the video game Fortnite, which was released in the year 2017 – and this added to the slightly lazy feel of the writing.

In conclusion, this was a highly creative book that was unlike anything else I have read this year and some of the characters and stories were original and entertaining, but unfortunately as a whole Luckenbooth just wasn’t for me. I feel the author has some good ideas and a talent for writing but seems to lack the focus to tie all her weird and wonderful mini-stories into a coherent and enjoyable novel that works as a unit. Sadly, she also over-estimates the novelty and shock factor of her quite honestly widely shared opinions. However, for those who enjoy poetry and dark fairy-tale-style stories, I would recommend this book.

Daenerys

Elite Reviewing Group received a copy of this book to review.