Fire Rush

Love changes everything in Fire Rush, an unforgettable new novel by Jacqueline Crooks. Set amid the Jamaican diaspora in London at the dawn of the 1980s, Fire Rush is a mesmerizing story of love, loss, & self-discovery that vibrates with the liberating power of music. 

'He takes my hand, pulls me to him. This is our dancing time.' 

"Fire Rush is a dramatic page-turner with a big heart & a careful eye toward the Jamaican diaspora, ranking it among some of the most gripping releases in recent memory.”  – Chicago Review of Books

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 & 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, & who offers her the chance of freedom & escape. 

"I was blown away by Fire Rush - an exceptional & stunningly original novel by a major new writer... her mesmerising, imaginative & 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 & changed & already longed to reread it." – Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

A debut about dub reggae, love, loss & freedom, Fire Rush is an electrifying state-of-the-nation novel & an unforgettable portrait of Black womanhood.

Jacqueline Crooks is a Jamaican-born British writer. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize & the BBC National Short Story Award. Her story collection, The Ice Migration, was longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Fire Rush is her first novel.