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Read an extract from Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks

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Reading lists

Vintage new writers to discover in 2023

Cover image for Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks: red and green screenprint of woman with afro and hoop earrings on yellow background.

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Features

A Fire Rush playlist, curated by Jacqueline Crooks

A graphic collage of six books against a multi-coloured yellow, pink and green background.

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9 books by Caribbean authors

Fire Rush

Remarkable... In terms of sheer lyrical force it stands head and shoulders above most debuts

I was blown away by Fire Rush - an exceptional and stunningly original novel by a major new writer... Her mesmerising, imaginative and incantatory writing leaves us swaying to the bass of the visceral rhythms she so powerfully describes. By the end of the novel, I felt charged and changed and already longed to reread it

Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER

Few have channelled so well the skittering beats and transcendent air of dub music as Crooks does in her semi-autobiographical debut... Startlingly vivid reading

A heady swirl of a novel that pulls the reader in from the first page... A fabulous, absorbing read

Maggie O'Farrell, author of THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT

A window into the dub scene at the time, with rhythmic, lyrical writing and a story about raving, love and the impact of police violence... Both a page turner and a literary novel... Truly remarkable

A hypnotic journey into the dub reggae scene

This beautiful, sprawling narrative is wrought with an incredible precision and a musicality which carries every sentence. Crooks' novel haunts but make space for hope as well

Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of OPEN WATER

A colourful, immersive debut... Throughout, a passion and anger resound as we gain a glimpse into a rarely observed British subculture

A brilliant, exuberant novel. Full of beauty, musicality and feminist power

A scorching, lyrical debut, soaked in dub reggae

A rich and rhythmic story... Fire Rush is a startlingly good debut

A wonderfully literary, musical and original novel about a culture and era that rarely makes the pages of fiction… Crooks writes with depth and maturity

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

Ambitious, atmospheric... This is a full-blooded novel of passion and anger with a deep, bassy resonance

Fire Rush is a lyrical debut powered by uncompromising political force

A startling debut novel... Jacqueline Crooks has crafted a richly textured world... She succeeds with great aplomb

Penetrates a subculture that we are unused to seeing represented in British fiction, depicting it in all its messy, exuberant complexity

Fire Rush is a book with the power to fill and break your heart... One of the strongest debuts of the year

An eye-opening, jaw-dropping story

An immersive debut... This is a triumph

Jacqueline Crooks' lyrical debut dances to the rhythm of the reggae music that pulses throughout it, in a powerful portrait of black womanhood

Fire Rush is an incredible marriage of music and prose set amid the late 1970s dub reggae scene

Jacqueline Crooks grew up in 70s and 80s Southall, part of London’s migrant community carving out a space through music, culture and politics. Fire Rush, her first novel, was shortlisted for multiple prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Jhalak Prize. It won the PEN American Open Book Award and the Paul Torday Memorial Prize. It was also chosen as an Observer Best Debut Novel of the Year. For her short stories, a selection of which was published in the collection The Ice Migration, she has been nominated for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize and BBC National Short Story Award.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WATERSTONES DEBUT FICTION PRIZE 2023 
AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVEL OF THE YEAR 
 
It’s time to dance, to love, to be free… 
 
‘Mesmerising’ BERNARDINE EVARISTO, author of Girl, Woman, Other 
‘Fabulous’ MAGGIE O'FARRELL, author of Hamnet 
‘Beautiful’ CALEB AZUMAH NELSON, author of Open Water 
 
Yamaye lives for the weekend, when she can go raving with her friends at The Crypt, an underground club on the outskirts of London. Then everything changes. Yamaye meets Moose, who she falls deeply in love with, and who offers her the chance of freedom and escape. 
 
After their relationship is brutally cut short, Yamaye goes on a dramatic journey of transformation that leads her to Jamaica, where past and present collide with explosive consequences. 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2024 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE AUTHOR’S CLUB BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2024 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PAUL TORDAY PRIZE 2024 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE McKITTERICK PRIZE 2024 
A SUNDAY TIMES AND GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
‘A wonderfully literary, musical and original novel about a culture and era that rarely makes the pages of fiction’ TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 
 
‘Scorching… We follow Yamaye through love, loss and peril, as she chases her dreams and connects with her heritage’ GUARDIAN 
 
‘Ambitious, atmospheric… A novel of passion and anger’ SUNDAY TIMES 
 
‘A rich and rhythmic story about love and music’ iNEWS

Jacqueline Crooks

Visceral, shocking, moving - Jacqueline Crooks proves yet again that she is an absolutely fantastic writer

Hypnotically beautiful, almost weightless, Sky City is the literary equivalent of an out-of-body experience. In the best ways it pole-axed me.

Jacqueline Crooks is the rare groove of literature - she writes with a rhythm, imagination and unique language that makes even the searing pain of this novel transcendent

Poetic, truthful and powerful, Sky City gives glittering insight into a wounded black female subjectivity, offering agency and empathy. A beautiful read

Shimmering and kaleidoscopic, Sky City is an exhilarating, compelling story that goes deep into the self, and what it is to feel human

In this rich, searching novel, Jacqueline Crooks writes with great skill and quiet acuity about how the past resists containment, returning in disquieting ways. It is an unsettling yet compassionate exploration of childhood trauma, threaded with the promise of love and redemption, and a lyrical hymn to London’s overlooked places of sanctuary

Sky City invites us fully into the texture of the 90s. Deeply enjoyable and carrying itself with a calm assurance, this is a novel that is built to last

Sky City is the soul electric, attuned to star-stuff in every word and in every cell of Jaycee's body. A heartbreaking but heartening tale that heals us. I adore this book, the world is transformed by it.

[A] riveting second novel, Crooks’ rhythmic, lyrical prose transports us to a North London housing estate in the 1990s, where three lives intersect to haunting effect… A richly textured story of trauma, friendship, loneliness and redemption, and an evocative portrait of ‘90s London

A luminous novel. Crooks captures the textures of Black British life in the 80s and 90s with tenderness, fury, and breathtaking prose

Gorgeously redemptive, and hugely courageous. Enter Sky City to hear the rare grooves and taste the soul food of 90s London, and meet three people so tenderly, so irrefutably, alive they will overflow your heart with their brightness and passion

This is heavy but ultimately hopeful stuff, shot through with shape-shifting imagery, sometimes urban, sometimes natural, sometimes Sun Ra-style cosmic, sometimes musical… inspiring

[A] propulsive and sharp second novel

[A] powerful, lyrical second novel… brimful of music and otherworldly images

Crooks’ has explored themes with sensitivity making it a powerful and thought-provoking read

Fire Rush announced a singular literary talent… Sky City is, in many ways, even more ambitious. It is a haunting, polyphonic meditation on trauma and belonging that hovers between realism and dream

This fluid, hypnotic and psychologically powerful novel compels the reader with its internal music and foreshadowing of a bold, shattering denouement

Crooks delivers…[the story] with such intensity and commitment that we are fully immersed

A spellbinding portrait of 90s London and three lives brought together by chance, from the Women’s Prize-shortlisted author of Fire Rush 
 
*Guardian book to read 2026* 
 
'Hypnotically beautiful' Louise Kennedy 
'A lyrical hymn to London's overlooked places of sanctuary' Hannah Lowe 
 
After years in a hostel for young homeless women, Jaycee finally has a room of her own high up in Sky City, a housing estate in north London carved out of the glow-in-the-dark sky. But the past is not so easily forgotten and her childhood continues to haunt her. When an old classmate, Sol, reappears, he seems to offer her a lifeline. Sol was her first love, and the only person who looked out for Jaycee when they were kids. Can she trust him now? 
 
Her best friend from the hostel is Ella-G, who has left London for the glamorous world of the New York music scene. Both Jaycee and Ella-G are daughters in search of fathers. When Jaycee finds a rare record that seems to lead to Ella-G’s father, the two women go searching for answers in Atlantic City. What Jaycee encounters there brings her to the edges of her identity. Back in London, can Jaycee, Sol and Ella-G find justice and healing, even as their worlds threaten to crash together and splinter apart?

Jacqueline Crooks

Books by Jacqueline Crooks

Articles featuring Jacqueline Crooks

Read an extract from Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks

Vintage new writers to discover in 2023

A Fire Rush playlist, curated by Jacqueline Crooks

9 books by Caribbean authors

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