Overview

Luckenbooth is an audacious, many-voiced gothic that binds the fates of Edinburgh’s residents to one notorious address: 10 Luckenbooth Close. Across the twentieth century - and beyond - a curse threads through the building, seeping into the lives of a shifting cast whose stories interlock like crooked floorboards. The result is a dark, dazzling tapestry of the city’s hidden heart.

Writing & Atmosphere

Fagan’s prose has bite and music - lyrical one moment, knife-clean the next. She conjures rooms steeped in damp and memory, stairwells that remember footsteps, and a city that feels both bodily and mythic. Chapters flicker between eras with cinematic confidence, and motifs - antlers, coins, blood, the sea - recur like charms pinned to a jacket.

The gothic here is never mere costume: it’s a pressure system. Violence, poverty, and superstition weather the characters like stone in rain, while the building itself becomes a sentient witness, holding grief and tenderness in its joists.

Characters

From the devil’s daughter who sets the curse, to bohemians, sex workers, queer lovers, and those society overlooks - voices arrive vivid and defiant. Fagan gives each narrator a distinct timbre; even in brief chapters, lives flare with specificity. The cumulative effect is choral: a tenement of souls singing through time.

Themes

Curses and hauntings become lenses for inheritance - of trauma, of city myth, of the bodies we’re born into. The novel reckons with misogyny, class, and the policing of desire, while insisting on connection and chosen kin. Memory is architecture here: who built it, who gets locked out, and who learns the secret doors.

What Worked

• Atmosphere for days: Edinburgh rendered as living folklore.
• Polyphonic structure: short, electric chapters that click together.
• Bold imagery: recurring symbols that deepen resonance rather than decorate.
• Human core: tenderness and rage held in the same palm.

Minor Quibbles

• The kaleidoscopic cast can disorient if you prefer a single through-line.
• Some threads close abruptly - fitting the curse’s logic, but leaving edges purposefully ragged.

Final Thoughts

Fierce, eerie, and gloriously alive, Luckenbooth turns a tenement into a mythic engine - grinding history into song. Fagan’s novel is a love letter to the unsung and a spell for anyone who’s ever felt a building watch them back.

Rating: ★★★★½☆ (4.5/5)