Fire Rush

Name: Fire Rush
Author: Jacqueline Crooks
ISBN: 1787333647

by Jacqueline Crooks

The fifth book on the 2023 Women’s Prize shortlist is Jacqueline Crooks’ Fire Rush , another debut that made a huge splash on arrival. Fire Rush is set between London, Bristol, and Jamaica in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is written partly in patois, and brings readers into a world of gangsters, raves, and police brutality. “I believe that literature and music intersect and so I wanted to bring that strong dub reggae soundtrack into the telling of this story,” the author told the Chicago Review of Books . “I did a lot of experimenting with language, dub reggae sound effects, and toasting lyrics to tell the story of this sub-culture in a way that evoked that time and place and the extraordinary people within it.” It’s a novel with a strong sense of setting, community, and musicality—one that is drawn from the author’s own experiences and took sixteen years to write.

Recommended by

Cal Flyn

"The fifth book on the 2023 Women’s Prize shortlist is Jacqueline Crooks’ Fire Rush , another debut that made a huge splash on arrival. Fire Rush is set between London, Bristol, and Jamaica in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is written partly in patois, and brings readers into a world of gangsters, raves, and police brutality. “I believe that literature and music intersect and so I wanted to bring that strong dub reggae soundtrack into the telling of this story,” the author told the Chicago Review of Books . “I did a lot of experimenting with language, dub reggae sound effects, and toasting lyrics to tell the story of this sub-culture in a way that evoked that time and place and the extraordinary people within it.” It’s a novel with a strong sense of setting, community, and musicality—one that is drawn from the author’s own experiences and took sixteen years to write."

The 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction Shortlist · fivebooks.com