Fire Rush: SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023

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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.

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. She stops and eyes a sashay dress with transparent bodice and rainbow pleats through a shop window. Bad’n’raas stylish. Cut to kill. The writing in Fire Rush is inspired by the author’s own experiences. Jacqueline Crooks grew up in London in the 1970s and 1980s, part of a migrant community carving out a space through music, culture and politics.

Jacqueline Crooks' debut Fire Rush is a vibrant journey into clubs, music and culture, set in the late 70s and early 80s between England and Jamaica

It’s full of amazing characters some with good hearts such as Moose and others who have dark souls but all are portrayed so well you see them with your minds eye. 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 I loved writing the scene where Yamaye is driving the getaway car, evading the police and speeding through the streets of Bristol. In fiction, it’s often the men at the wheels of the car or the plane or running ahead and leading the way. I had an experience that was very similar to that scene where I was driving a car with three men who were getting away from a gang. So I enjoyed drawing on that experience and using artistic licence to bring in elements of history where women used their bodies as vessels to escape slavery. 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 Rumer’s family are Travellers. They move from town to town, country to country, in their caravans. She left them five years ago to get away from a man they wanted her to marry. The council gave her a studio flat.

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.

Here, in this place of ecstatic sonic communion, where the air itself seems to vibrate with the souls of her ancestors, Yamaye feels uniquely alive and at home. It’s here too that she meets Moose, a soulful furniture-maker with dreams of returning to Jamaica, which the quietly unhappy Yamaye (who has never gotten over the loss of her own Jamaican-born mother when she was young) starts to believe she might share.

Or maybe Asase is different because she didn’t go to the same run-down school as me and Rumer. Father Mullaney wrote a letter for Oraca and got Asase into a quality Catholic school. She screamed at me, ‘Your feet! They’re dirty! You think you can just walk across the bare floor and get into my bed?’ The prose here is excellent - I didn't understand all the slang but I understood enough, Crooks did a great job of balancing the vernacular with "standard" English. Yamaye's story is quite sweeping and takes the reader on quite the journey. I felt that the pacing was a touch off during the second and third parts, and the ending felt a bit abrupt. I'm not opposed to an open-ending but I felt like this was a little bit of an awkward spot to leave the story.

Magee couldn’t find a way into his partly autobiographical material until a whiskey-fuelled heart to heart with the author Thomas Morris, who was then editing the influential Dublin literary magazine the Stinging Fly. Morris suggested Magee write him a letter “starting off at any point in my life and go from there”. After two weeks, the letter was 20,000 words long; after three months, Magee had the germ of Close to Home. Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings; The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates; Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. I really enjoy Jacob Ross, Olive Senior and Leone Ross’s short stories. When you’re going through a hard time, there’s that narcissistic feeling: how can everybody else not see that this is a catastrophe? How is everybody else just getting on with their daily lives? But that’s the experience of ‘apocalypse’ that we’re all having right now,” he says. “Everybody kind of knows the world is ending but most people aren’t engaged in strident climate denial or Extinction Rebellion. Most people think, ‘We’ll probably be incinerated soon, but I dunno.’”

Second, I would like to spend the weekend away with Herbert Peters. Herbert Peters is based on Peter Herbert OBE, the barrister and political activist who fights against racism and injustice (He gave me permission to draw on his life and also helped with research). I’d like to spend the weekend find out more about what drives him to stay on the front line of activism, taking on superstructures. I’d like to find out more about his work, especially in the 1970s. I’d like to find out what he thinks about Fire Rush and the position of women on the front line who experience violence from within their own community. I like to know whether he thinks fiction can have a political impact and be the starting point for communication and engagement between opposing ideas or people. Yamaye is the MC whose best friends are Asase and Rumer, and the 3 girls like to spend their weekends at clubs dancing and listening the the "riddem" of the music. But Yamaye meets a man named Moose and they fall in love. That didn't stop Asase from trying to move in on him since she seems to be a flirt and the trouble-maker of the group. In this original and enchanting novel, we meet Yamaye, who longs for weekends when she can go raving with her friends at the Crypt, an underground club on the outskirts of London where she was born and raised.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. I was blown away by Fire Rush—an exceptional and stunningly original novel by a major new writer. Through the life of a young woman, Jacqueline Crooks excavates a submerged aspect of Britain’s underground cultures—the dub reggae scene of the 1970s and 80s. She takes us deep inside its wild, angry and hungry soul, and her mesmerizing, 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 re-read it.”—Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other A startling debut novel... Jacqueline Crooks has crafted a richly textured world... She succeeds with great aplomb Guardian Yamaye starts seeing a guy called Moose. She can't keep her happiness to herself for long and her friends work out she's in a relationship - more: she's in love. Life seems so sweet - she can forget about her father Irving, her Muma's ghost seems benevolent, and they all live for nights in The Crypt. Maybe she'll even try singing; after all, Moose likes her voice.