Ootlin

by Jenni Fagan

First published 2023

In the rain-slicked streets of Edinburgh, sixteen-year-old Rae MacLeod tracks a spectral presence that keeps vanishing into abandoned council flats. Her obsession begins after discovering cryptic notes left in her late grandmother's journals—fragments describing an unidentified entity that moves between physical spaces without rules. Local authorities dismiss her claims as teenage fantasy, but Rae knows something impossible is stalking her neighborhood's forgotten margins. As she assembles a makeshift investigation using secondhand equipment and her own stubborn intuition, she realizes the ghost might be connected to a decades-old unsolved disappearance in her family. Her search will force her to confront not just an inexplicable presence, but the blurred boundaries between memory, perception, and supernatural survival. Her hunt is about to change everything she understands about inheritance and haunting.

Genres: mystery, fantasy, contemporary, ghost-stories

Vibes: atmospheric, dark, emotional, suspenseful

Tropes: supernatural-elements, unreliable-narrator

Setting: Edinburgh, Scotland

Period: contemporary

336 pages · Paperback · Hutchinson Heinemann

More by Jenni Fagan

Readers who liked Ootlin also liked

View on Siftivo