CONFINEMENT to my tenement flat during the height of lockdown offered a rare opportunity of gazing across the road to see all the other dwellings occupied, each playing out their own stories in such close proximity but all oblivious to one another.

Tenements contain multitudes but it is only in art that their stories can be seen together and such is the case with Jenni Fagan’s latest novel , which traces the lives of the residents in one Edinburgh tenement over the course of the 20th century.

It’s a microcosm of its variegated histories, peopled with characters both real and mythical, and its gothic undertow is  almost mandatory for any work set in Scotland’s capital. Thus the devil’s daughter arrives to bear the child of a philanthropist and upstanding member of civic Edinburgh.
 
In other narratives, a spy prepares for her first assignment before being deployed in WWII, gangsters with animal masks are engaged in a turf war with a Chinese-operated syndicate, a medium threatens to reveal the dark secrets of the building and a recently laid-off miner has to confront his fear of light.