The Delusions

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What to expect

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

Critics Review

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
Jenni Fagan is a force of nature. Her vision of purgatory is the perfect book to read while the world burns.
Fern Brady
The Delusions drops us into an afterlife as full of contradiction, humour, heartache, rage, mystery and red tape as life itself. I never thought I'd welcome the end of the world so wholeheartedly.
Krystelle Bamford
The much anticipated new novel from Jenni Fagan. As ever, her prose is energetic, unique and fearless, and her tale full of rage and compassion. ... The Delusions is a novel that asks big questions about life on earth, and beyond, in a wholly relatable way.
Scotland on Sunday
In the afterlife's chaotic processing centre, Edi risks everything to reunite with her lost son as humanity edges towards extinction. Fagan – whose memoir Ootlin was longlisted for the Women's Prize – draws on the surreal in this searing novel about defiant love.
iNews
Fagan digs deep into what it means to be alive, and does so with such honesty and artistry it’s quite extraordinary.
The Skinny

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