The Delusions

By: Jenni Fagan

Narrated by: Jenni Fagan

Brought to you by Penguin.

The outstanding new novel from the prize-winning author of The Panopticon, Luckenbooth and Ootlin

Edi is facing a disciplinary since her 'incident' at work. Forty-seven years in Admin processing the newly dead is not how she foresaw eternity.

In Arrivals, the newly dead must take the stages in order: first, extract delusion; second, answer HR's questionnaire truthfully. Yet who among them can truly face who they are? Who may never pass at all? As leaderboard numbers begin to rise at unprecedented rates, rumours begin to fly. Humans are about to become a banned race. The earth is going to be repossessed.

As chaos descends, Edi hopes this might finally be the moment she has waited for, so she might see her son again who she was forced to leave on Earth when she died. Edi wants to be the one waiting for him, even if HR protocols forbid it. Looking out at the millions of newly dead arriving, Edi has one question - what might any of us truly be willing to do for those we love at the doors of eternity?

Against a spectacular backdrop of stars, constellations and comets, a mass extinction event begins to unfurl watched by the entire universe as Processing, the largest soul terminus in existence, decides it is now time to take matters wholly back into its own hands. With reflections on love, defiance and light, The Delusions is a story of profound human connection, on an unprecedented scale.

'Brilliant, original, daring, a 1984 for the afterlife' Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting

'Wholly wondrous ... I'm improved for having read it' Niall Griffiths, author of Broken Ghosts

© Jenni Fagan 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Critic reviews

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.

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)

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.

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.

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).

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)

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)

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)

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)