The Delusions

There is wondrously clever, imaginative and slyly satirical world building here. Metaphysical splendours too: as night falls, “galaxies unfurl” and all newcomers stop, awestruck, to gaze at Earth below… What is undeniable is that Fagan, a Granta best young British novelist in 2013, is a fierce talent. * The Times *A witty metaphysical satire about what happens when the processes that help souls pass on begin to fail…The Delusions fizzes with impatience, invention and humour. Fagan’s targets are exactly what we’d hope: greed, politics, celebrity. – M John Harrison * Guardian *A scorching meditation on being human set in the unforgiving realm of a “godless” afterlife. … In the tradition of Dante’s Inferno and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, it is a caustic treatise on the mortal plane, as well as an abstract portrait of a parallel society malfunctioning in an imaginary beyond. * Financial Times *The Modern Mary Shelley … Fagan is a one-off producing work of such originality that it has defied categorisation and created its own descriptor - Fagan-esque. * The Scotsman *Love, life, death. They’re all great subjects for writers, and each finds a place in this glorious, garrulous, gallimaufry of a novel from Jenni Fagan, Scotland’s Booker Prize winner in waiting (hopefully). * The Herald *Brilliant, original, daring, a 1984 for the afterlife and a fabulous satire. It really makes you think about what it means to be human. – Irvine WelshJenni Fagan is an outstanding writer of the highest order. I wish I could write the way she does. Read The Delusions and bathe in her imagination and then read everything she has ever written. … She is brilliant. – Lemn SissayThe Delusions is beautiful, angry and awe-inspiring in the breadth of its scope and ambitions. This novel will stay with me for a very long time. It got under my skin from the very first chapter and I read it obsessively. Jenni Fagan is doing things other authors can’t even dream of and we’re so lucky to have her books in the world. – Kirstin InnesWhat a tumultuous talent Jenni Fagan is. A despair with and a deep love for the human race drives this curious, unclassifiable and wholly wondrous story of functionaries caught up in a cosmic bureaucracy. Here is resilience, empathy, great humour, and an abiding pity for all life on Earth in all its fuss, muck, glory and terrible fragility. I am improved for having read it. The world is improved for including it. – Niall GriffithsBold and brilliant, poignant and profound, Jenni Fagan imagines an afterlife for our self- and mass-deluded time. Fagan’s novel is as moving as it is funny and has resonated with this reader long after the last page turned. – Jess Kidd

Jenni Fagan was born in Scotland. She won the Gordon Burn Prize for her memoir, Ootlin, which was also longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. Her debut novel, The Panopticon, saw her selected as a Granta Best Young British Novelist, and her second novel, The Sunlight Pilgrims, gained her Scottish Author of the Year. Jenni has been listed for the Encore Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, and the Pushcart Prize. She is a Doctor of Philosophy, a member of Liberty, and a Royal Society of Literature Fellow. She lives in Edinburgh with her son.

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