Incantatory and immersive, Crooks’ triumphant debut is an expansive story about love, freedom, raving and the impact of police violence on Black communities, told with immense musicality and emotional honesty.
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023
Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2024
He takes my hand, pulls me to him. 'This is our dancing time.'
Yamaye lives for the weekend, when she can go raving with her friends at The Crypt, an underground club in the industrial town on the outskirts of London where she was born and raised. A young woman unsure of her future, the sound is her guide - a chance to discover who she really is in the rhythms of those smoke-filled nights. In the dance-hall darkness, dub is the music of her soul, her friendships, her ancestry.
But everything changes when she meets Moose, the man she falls deeply in love with, and who offers her the chance of freedom and escape.
When their relationship is brutally cut short, Yamaye goes on a dramatic journey of transformation that takes her first to Bristol - where she is caught up in a criminal gang and the police riots sweeping the country - and then to Jamaica, where past and present collide with explosive consequences.
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781529925036
Number of pages: 352
Weight: 247 g
Dimensions: 198 x 130 x 23 mm
Remarkable... In terms of sheer lyrical force it stands head and shoulders above most debuts - Daily Telegraph
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 - Daily Telegraph, Summer Reads of 2023*
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 - Vogue
This is a confident, lyrical, powerful work. The author handles tonal change very well and is able, through an involving narrative, to sustain the pull of heritage, underwater imagery and the rhythms of the often... More
This book was featured in the 2023 version of the influential annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature (past years have included Natasha Brown, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Douglas Stuart, Sally Rooney, Rebecca Watson,... More
I struggled to get into this book as I found the speech really difficult to follow, which is a shame as it felt like the author had a lot to say.
Maybe if there is an audio version I will try that as hearing the words...
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