1910, Edinburgh. Jessie, the devil's daughter, arrives on the doorstep of an imposing tenement building and knocks on a freshly painted wooden door. She has been sent by her father to bear a child for a wealthy couple, but, when things go wrong, she places a curse on the building and all who live there - and it lasts a century.
Caught in the crossfire are the residents of 10 Luckenbooth Close and they all have their own stories to tell. While the world outside is changing, inside, the curse creeps up all nine floors and through each door. Soon, the building's longest kept secret - the truth of what happened to Jessie - will finally be heard.
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MY FATHER'S corpse stares out across the North Atlantic swells. 1910, FLAT 1F1 (JENNY MCRAE, 21)
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(@PenguinUKBooks, 14 January 2021, ebook, 338 pages, borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveInc)
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I really enjoyed Luckenbooth. This is a strange book. It's structured like a series of short stories with each chapter focusing on a different resident in 10 Luckenbooth Close spanning from 1910 to the present and the occasional interlude which focuses on Jessie's story rather than a typical novel. Each character features more than once and we gradually find out their secrets and the effect living in the cursed building has on each of them. This is a gothic treat.