Ratings10
Average rating3.6
A bold, haunting, and startlingly unique novel about the secrets we leave behind and the places that hold them long after we are gone, a “quintessential novel of Edinburgh at its darkest.” (Irvine Welsh) There are stories tucked away on every floor of 10 Luckenbooth Close. 1910, Edinburgh. Jessie MacRae has been sent to a tenement building 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, 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 as 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.
Reviews with the most likes.
The voices, perspectives, everything felt so very 2022, which is a problem when the book is supposed to be around 100 years before.
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, for example - but other parts were so incredibly brilliant, and one simple sentence in particular bloody terrified me, so swings and roundabouts.
Once I picked this up I could not put it down. Fagan's prose and imagery had me captured and I loved the story, it complimented together perfectly.
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