Fire Rush

"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."