This novel takes you on an emotional and unforgettable journey. I love the multiple images of fire such as the fire rush inna me bredrin which appear cleverly throughout. This is a terrific debut and a writer to watch in the future. Highly recommended. The blonde shop assistant looks at the signature on the cheque-book and compares it with the chequecard. She stares at Asase and Asase smiles inna her face. Not a real smile, a hard-faced show of teeth. The woman puts the dress into a silver cardboard bag and hands it to Asase.

Jacqueline Crooks is 59 and was born in Jamaica but grew up in Southall, west London. Her first novel, Fire Rush, began life as entries in her diary and is essentially a fictional portrait of her early years. “It’s very much based on my experience of being a young woman in a male-dominated world. Experiencing oppression. Dancing with wonderful people. The dark side and the light side as well.” 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 Daily Telegraph, *Summer Reads of 2023*Amuch-anticipated debut novel . . . Crooks artfully examines the conflicts of clashing cultures and what it means to be in constant fear for your life. It’s a tale of very raw emotions and heavy grief, but Crooks leaves space for hope. The lyricism of her prose rings out through her use of patois, creating a multilayered literary experience that speaks to the soul like a great reggae album. Perfect for fans of Bernardine Evaristo and Edwidge Danticat.”— Booklist After dinner, when we’re half-crazed from the fallout of ganja high and sound-system nosebleeds, Oraca lights candles and puts a jazz record on, the volume humming on the low-down like a distant sea. The narrative focuses on the evolution of Yamaye, a Jamaican-British youngster in her twenties who lives on a deteriorating housing estate in West London. Her mother, a midwife, died in Guyana while on a work mission when Yamaye was a child. She shares an apartment with her emotionally distant father and trudges along in the marginalized routine of the working poor. Her only respite comes on the weekends when she can immerse herself in the swirl and haze of music and ganja. While she parties with her girlfriends underground in the aptly named “Crypt,” Yamaye glimpses the beginnings of a metaphysical and physical journey. The pulsating rhythms of her subterranean world anesthetize her from her daily drudgery and simultaneously energize her to probe and discover her inner voice.

Tombstone’s oppressed youth find their oppositional voice, inflected with Jamaican English, spinning tunes and flinging down lyrics in the male-dominated Crypt. The men have competition in Yamaye, whose musical talent underlines an unspoken truth: “Man preach revolution but woman carry its sound.” Yamaye is also grieving for her mother, who took off for Guyana when she was a child, and is now presumed dead. She’s been raised by Irving, her caustic father, who mostly spared her the rod but whose “belt used to be his tongue”. Set in the late 1970s and 80s Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks follows second-generation Jamaican –British Yamaye, as she embarks on a journey of self-discovery. We meet her in her early twenties, living with her father, who, for the most part, ignores her in a run-down apartment complex in Norwood, London. Her mother, a midwife, never returned from a work trip to Jamaica when she was a child. Working a night-shift factory job, the only vibrant aspect of her life is the time she spends with her friends at The Crypt, an underground dub reggae club amidst the music and the ganja clouds, or in the local record store. When she meets Moose, a carpenter and fellow Jamaican, at the club, she begins to dream of a life different from her own. But when tragedy strikes and violence erupts, she escapes to Bristol with a recent acquaintance who forces her into a life of crime. Fortunately for her, she finds a way out. Eventually, she travels to Jamaica on a quest of a more personal nature, but will she find what she is looking for? I absolutely hate that I didn't love this book because I felt like the writing was done beautifully and that the author conveyed the setting and conditions of Jamaicans in London during "Babylon" quite well, especially for her debut novel. But I have to be honest and say that for me it was just okay. I think that part of the reason is that the dialect threw me off at times and that is an issue with me, not everyone. There were times I just didn't know what was being said even though I tried. So it was slow going for me and I really struggled with it. I was reading a biography of Oscar Wilde and came across John Addington Symonds. I was amazed that I didn’t know his name and I started trying to consider how one could write [a novel] about gay experiences in the late 19th century without Wilde. I do think that his story is such an omnipresent one and defines our whole sense of that period for gay men, and I was just delighted to discover this gay man who was making far more modern arguments than prevailed in the 1960s. Ambitious, atmospheric... This is a full-blooded novel of passion and anger with a deep, bassy resonance Sunday TimesWell, you’re going to show me up to be a very bad literary citizen because I hardly ever read any new fiction. I have just been on a huge binge of the writer Margaret Oliphant, who I am evangelical about because I think she is the most underappreciated Victorian novelist there is. This beautiful, sprawling narrative is wrought with an incredible precision and a musicality which carries every sentence. Crooks’ novel haunts but makes space for hope as well.”—Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of Open Water The lights in the shops go out. Asase and Rumer march ahead on the darkening streets. Best shut me mouth: the sistren need each other on the streets, in the dance hall. Together we are a three-pin plug, charging ourselves to dub riddim. Connecting through each other to the underground. Tragedy strikes and Yamaye's world is turned on its head, losing Moose, Asase and Rumer within a very short time. Wounded and needy, she moves to Bristol, but controlling people surrounding her. She can't escape the regression to her childhood self, as her father appears to materialise in other people. She is living in a 'Safe House' which is anything but safe, and it is here she attempts to locate some connections to her roots, to Jamaica, to free herself from the torment of everyday living.

Street vendors toss peanuts in spinning copper plates that hum caramel notes like the flipside of a 45. She screamed at me, ‘Your feet! They’re dirty! You think you can just walk across the bare floor and get into my bed?’ I wrote a piece on local government for the LRB [Crewe worked as an intern for former Labour government minister Margaret Hodge for six months] – it got a lot of attention and an agent wrote to me out of the blue. An incredible story . . . The rich descriptions of Yamaye and her friends skanking to the music are immersive and gesture at the spirits of Yamaye’s Jamaican forebears . . . [ Fire Rush] is a triumph.”— Publishers Weekly (starred review) The biggest surprise of all was the housemistress. She wasn’t there at the start and she ended up being my favourite character. That queer mentorship is so crucial to the protagonist and I really enjoyed paying homage to the kind of relationship you don’t read much about. I aspire to be like the housemistress but emotionally I’m more like the protagonist.

Fire Rush is very much a story about power - who has it, over whom and how they use it. When we first meet Yamaye, she seems happy, but as we get to know her we realise how trapped she is by the struggle to understand who she is and where she comes from, by society's view of her and by the relationships that have come to define her. Every relationship in the story is beautifully complicated and real: with her distant, abusive father, Irving; with her domineering best friend, Asase, whom she loves but with whom she can never truly be herself; with Moose and with Monassa. It's also a story of how female friendship can strengthen you and limit you, and at its core, it's a beautiful, heartbreaking love story. This isn't a book for the faint-hearted; it is really full of grief and heartache. Crooks has said it is loosely based on her life, and I ache to think of someone living this life. Not only racism, but police brutality and injustice, being stalked, confinement, organised crime, rape, self-harm and murder are among the themes. They are all dealt with very sensitively, but do start reading this book aware of the challenges you will read about.

The New Life is based, in part, on real people and revolves around a group of radical free thinkers in Victorian England who wish to live and love as they choose, without fear or shame. John Addington is married to Catherine, but falls for Frank, a working-class printer, while Henry Ellis’s wife desires women. Addington and Ellis decide to write a book together; a revolutionary text that will challenge convention and the law. Asase works part-time for a company in the city that makes perfumes. Dressed in silk wrap dresses, sniffing and mixing. ‘Like mekking music,’ she says. ‘Every scent’s a note.’ People have been surprised. It is escapist because of the setting but it’s not sentimental and it is quite hard-hitting. Stephen Buoro, 29, was born in Ososo, Nigeria, the fourth of six children. His father was a photographer, so their home was an artistic one, though the only books were religious texts. It wasn’t until Buoro won a scholarship to a missionary school, where children were caned for speaking any language other than English, that he learned to read. After earning a maths degree, he came to the UK to join the UEA’s creative writing MA as the recipient of the Booker prize foundation scholarship.

Jacqueline Crooks

A war in the animal kingdom. I showed it to a schoolfriend and he couldn’t believe that I wrote it. I think in some ways, all the writing I’ve done afterwards is a form of proof that I could do this. It’s 1am on a Friday night in 1978 in a church crypt in Norwood, south London, and a “mass of closed eye skankers…[are] dancing in darkness… skinning up with the dead. I feel them twisting around me, broken-beat bodies of sound… The Dub Master spinning versions of delayed time.”