Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks

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

Love changes everything in Fire Rush, the unforgettable novel about Black womanhood from Jacqueline Crooks, chosen as a top 10 debut novel in 2023 by the Observer.

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 and then to Jamaica, where past and present collide with explosive consequences.

'Wrought with an incredible precision and a musicality which carries every sentence' - Caleb Azumah Nelson

'I was blown away by Fire Rush ... Mesmerising, imaginative and incantatory' - Bernardine Evaristo