Luckenbooth

Written by Jenni Fagan

Narrated by Jeff Harding, Cathleen McCarron, Fiona McNeill and David McCallion

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W. F. Howes Ltd
• Release date: Jan 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781004032426

Jenni Fagan

Jenni Fagan is a poet, novelist and screenwriter, and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Jenni was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists after the publication of her debut novel, The Panopticon, which was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize. Her adaptation of The Panopticon was staged by the National Theatre of Scotland to great acclaim. The Sunlight Pilgrims, her second novel, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award and the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award, and saw her win Scottish Author of the Year at the Herald Culture Awards. In 2022, Polygon published her most recent novel, Hex, and The Bone Library, a new poetry collection written during her time as a Writer in Residence at the Dick Vet Bone Library.