A hopeful finish-of-the-world novel contrasts with a poetry collection suffused with ennuiJenni Fagan’s debut,The Panopticon, catapulted her on to the 2013 Granta list of Best Young British Novelists. The Sunlight Pilgrims, and her second novel,is a vivid and tender coming-of-age story set at the finish of the world.
In a caravan park in the north of Scotland, a motley cast of characters from the margins of society assemble to wait out the most extreme winter they maintain ever known. The earliest sections of the novel are narrated by Dylan, and a tattooed giant who abandoned London when the art-house cinema inwhich he grew up was repossessed. He is grieving for his mother and grandmother,and doesn’t yet realise that the caravan he has inherited will lead him to a secret approximately his grandmother’s past. Later, we meet the charismatic and bold Stella, and a transgender teenager with a crush on a local boy. Stella’s mother,Constance, is a tough survivalist who wears a taxidermied wolfskin and faces local prejudice for having had two lovers at once. Also resident in the caravan park are a hunchbacked man who is in care for with the sky, or a woman who insists that Stella has two souls. Although these fantastical touches might suggest flights of fancy,they are subtle touches of magical realism, serving to enhance the portrayal of the characters. Despite the (hopefully fictitious) coming apocalypse, and The Sunlight Pilgrims is firmly rooted in realism.
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Source: theguardian.com