Below is the complete list of Jenni Fagan books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Darkland Tales Books
- Queen Macbeth (2024)
(By Val McDermid)
Queen Macbeth was first published in 2024; within the Darkland Tales series, it is listed as book #5. 
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Collections Books
Publication Order of The BBC National Short Story Award Books
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
- Ootlin (2023)
Ootlin was published in 2023 and is listed as book #1 in the Non-Fiction series.
About Jenni Fagan
Jenni Fagan is a Scottish novelist, poet, memoirist, and screenwriter whose work moves between literary realism, gothic fiction, speculative writing, historical imagination, and poetry. Her books repeatedly return to people living outside conventional structures: children in care, prisoners, outsiders, women persecuted for refusing prescribed roles, and characters trying to create identities within institutions determined to define them. Scottish landscapes are equally important, from residential units and Highland caravan parks to Edinburgh tenements, but Fagan rarely treats place as neutral scenery. Buildings, cities, and landscapes accumulate memory and often become active forces within her fiction.
Fagan was born in Scotland and spent her childhood within the care system. She lived through numerous foster placements and residential settings, experiences she later examined directly in her memoir Ootlin. Writing began early and eventually provided both a private means of survival and a route toward formal education. She studied at the University of Greenwich and Royal Holloway, University of London, and later completed a doctorate in creative writing at the University of Edinburgh.
Poetry preceded her emergence as a novelist. Early collections included Urchin Belle and The Dead Queen of Bohemia, and poetry has remained central to her career through later books such as There’s a Witch in the Word Machine, The Bone Library, and A Swan’s Neck on the Butcher’s Block. The compressed imagery and rhythmic intensity of her poetry are also evident in her prose, which frequently combines harsh subject matter with surreal or lyrical passages.
Her debut novel, The Panopticon, introduced fifteen-year-old Anais Hendricks, who enters a care institution while suspected of assaulting a police officer. Fagan drew on her understanding of institutional life without turning Anais into a simple autobiographical substitute. The novel examines surveillance, state authority, trauma, imagination, and the complicated loyalties formed among young people whose lives are administered by others. Its reception led to Fagan being selected for Granta’s 2013 list of Best of Young British Novelists.
The Sunlight Pilgrims moved into speculative fiction, imagining an increasingly frozen Britain during severe climate disruption. Set largely in rural Scotland, it follows Dylan alongside Constance and her transgender daughter Stella, using environmental catastrophe to explore family, identity, isolation, and adaptation.
With Luckenbooth, Fagan created a more overtly gothic and formally ambitious Edinburgh novel. Set within a fictional tenement across much of the twentieth century, it moves between generations of residents while a curse and the building’s buried histories gradually surface. Witchcraft, sexuality, exploitation, art, class, and urban memory intersect within a structure that allows Edinburgh itself to become one of the book’s principal presences.
Hex returns directly to Scotland’s history of witch persecution. Its imagined conversation between Geillis Duncan, condemned during the North Berwick witch trials, and a visitor from the future links sixteenth-century violence against women with later systems of judgment and control.
Fagan addressed her own history most explicitly in Ootlin, her memoir of childhood in care. The book won the 2025 Gordon Burn Prize and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
Her 2026 novel The Delusions expands into metaphysical territory, imagining an afterlife whose systems begin to fail while catastrophe unfolds on Earth. Despite its cosmic scale, it continues Fagan’s longstanding concern with authority, exclusion, survival, and the human need to make meaning from hostile systems.
Across fiction, memoir, and poetry, Fagan’s work is united less by genre than by perspective. She repeatedly writes from places respectable narratives overlook, giving outsiders not simply visibility but imaginative authority over the worlds that attempted to contain them.