The Delusions

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 Welsh

What 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 Griffiths

Jenni 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 Sissay

The 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 Innes

Bold 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

The Delusions drops us into an afterlife as full of contradiction, humour, heartache, rage, mystery and red tape as life itself. I never thought I'd welcome the end of the world so wholeheartedly.

Krystelle Bamford

The much anticipated new novel from Jenni Fagan. As ever, her prose is energetic, unique and fearless, and her tale full of rage and compassion. ... The Delusions is a novel that asks big questions about life on earth, and beyond, in a wholly relatable way.

Scotland on Sunday

In the afterlife's chaotic processing centre, Edi risks everything to reunite with her lost son as humanity edges towards extinction. Fagan – whose memoir Ootlin was longlisted for the Women's Prize – draws on the surreal in this searing novel about defiant love.

iNews

Jenni Fagan is a force of nature. Her vision of purgatory is the perfect book to read while the world burns.

Fern Brady

Fagan digs deep into what it means to be alive, and does so with such honesty and artistry it’s quite extraordinary.

The Skinny

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

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 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

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

Set against a striking celestial stage, Jenni Fagan’s The Delusions addresses universal concerns through the intensely personal. It’s a novel which reveals its layers with stealth, in no small part due to the unusual setting which is simultaneously heavenly and humdrum, and which takes time to fully comprehend. Love, loss, sickness, prejudice and pain are examined, but there’s also joy and hope, as the worst and best of humanity is made manifest.

The Skinny

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

Speculative and yet infinitely recognisable, this novel is deeply enjoyable, speaking truth to power with Fagan's consummate wit and fire. She celebrates the resistance that make us human.

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