From Powells.com
Staff Pick
This novel is quieter, somehow more gentle, than the recent slew of apocalypse stories. Fagan focuses on the everyday struggles of outcasts in a small Scottish town — their relationships, troubles, and triumphs. Even when the world is freezing over, human lives take center stage. Recommended By Ashleigh B., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The stunning new novel from the highly-acclaimed author of The Panopticon
It's November of 2020, and the world is freezing over. Each day colder than the last. There’s snow in Israel, the Thames is overflowing, and an iceberg separated from the Fjords in Norway is expected to drift just off the coast of Scotland. As ice water melts into the Atlantic, frenzied London residents evacuate by the thousands for warmer temperatures down south. But not Dylan. Grieving and ready to build life anew, he heads north to bury his mother’s and grandmother’s ashes on the Scottish islands where they once lived.
Hundreds of miles away, twelve-year-old Estella and her survivalist mother, Constance, scrape by in the snowy, mountainous Highlands, preparing for a record-breaking winter. Living out of a caravan, they spend their days digging through landfills, searching for anything with restorative and trading value. When Dylan arrives in their caravan park in the middle of the night, life changes course for Estella and Constance. Though the weather worsens, his presence brings a new light to daily life, and when the ultimate disaster finally strikes, they’ll all be ready.
Written in incandescent, dazzling prose, The Sunlight Pilgrims is a visionary story of courage and resilience in the midst of nature’s most violent hour; by turns an homage to the portentous beauty of our natural world, and to just how strong we can be, if the will and the hope is there, to survive its worst.
Review
"Fagan received widespread acclaim for her 2012 debut The Panopticon, and was named as one of the prestigious Granta Best of Young British Novelists a year later. The Sunlight Pilgrims further cements Fagan’s reputation as a writer of skill and depth…[She] writes like the poet that she is, with an original eye for description, a wonderful rhythm to her prose, and some genuinely inspiring and unusual characters. An impressive read." Big Issue
Review
"Fagan …explores some big ideas; namely the environment, gender and familial structure. She addresses these themes with an infectious, otherworldly hilarity, assembling an eccentric cast of characters who triumphantly flout convention." Times Literary Supplement
Review
"Fagan’s vivid, poetic-prose style injects the book with energy. She writes at the pace of thought, sentences like gunfire … She has a poet's affection for precision and image." Financial Times
Review
"[A] vivid and tender coming-of-age story set at the end of the world." Kirsty Logan, The Guardian
Review
"Fagan depicts the band of misfits assembled in the harbor town of Clachan Fells with the same warmth she invested in the teenage outcasts of her ambitious, exciting debut, The Panopticon (2013) … The frozen landscape is as beautiful as it is menacing in Fagan’s evocative descriptions, and the vast snowstorm that closes the novel finds Dylan, Stella, and Constance safe and warm inside…for now. Tales of "sunlight pilgrims" from the north lyrically reinforce the author’s theme that the struggle for survival can be joyful. More fine work from this gifted Scottish writer." Kirkus (Starred Review)
About the Author
Jenni Fagan was born in Scotland. She attended Greenwich University and won a scholarship to the Royal Holloway MFA. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was shortlisted for the Dublin Impac, The James Tait Black, and was named one of Granta‘s Best of Young British Novelists.