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

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She took her blue silk headwrap from under her pillow and covered her hair, all the time her eyes on me, her mouth set in a deep-cut line. I was wearing what I always wore, her oversized T-shirt with ‘Sweet Pussy!’ printed on the front. I pulled it down below my crotch. In 2005, the summer after my father died. I couldn’t even cry – writing was a way of bringing all those feelings out and examining them. We weren’t going anywhere, and I couldn’t get to the Isle of Wight, so I was living vicariously through all those negronis. There’s a lot of longing in there and I think you feel that. 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.’” Novelists have long harnessed the extemporised rhythms and cinematic ambience of jazz in prose, but I doubt any author has channelled so beautifully the skittering beats and otherworldly transcendence of dub as Jacqueline Crooks does in this remarkable, semi-autobiographical debut. Written partly in patois, it’s narrated by Yamaye, who lives with her taciturn father on the Tombstone estate and who every weekend heads out with her “gyals” – Asase, with her “high priestess glow” and Irish-born Rumer – to “skank” at a dance hall night held 10 feet below the ground.

The first thing you will notice about Fire Rush is the language – Partly Jamaican patois, part English , part musical terms, this prose is distinctive and stands out. I’ll write a bit more about it later. I look at the signatory’s name printed on the chequebook: Lucy Blewitt. I wonder who the hell this Lucy is, and I can’t believe that Asase is hustling again. Symonds was writing a book before he died with [a man called] Ellis. He was a gay man married to a straight woman, Ellis was a straight man married to a gay woman and I just suddenly saw that symmetry and mirroring of the two marriages. I thought: “That’s my novel.”She doesn’t need to hustle. She earns enough to rent her own flat, but she’s saving to buy a double-fronted house in the fancy town where she went to school. On her days off, she goes to the city with other crutchers, stealing clothes from designer shops, shoving them between their legs. We have no history,” says Asase, of a rootless nocturnal community sequestered away in tiny flats, where parents are either missing or withering away, where jobs are part-time and hopeless, and where men are directionless and dangerous. “I wonder why I attract these kinda men,” thinks Yamaye after one abusive encounter with a dancer known as Crab Man. “[Men] who are just like my father.”

Minchin said: “The diversity of thought and creativity of women writers at the moment is vast and exciting and inspiring. The list is eclectic and there are so many different types of stories and types of voices. For me, it took me to places that I wouldn’t necessarily have gone before.”

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 feel to tell him that I love him bad, but I'm afraid of songs with upbeat words and downbeat music and up to now that's all I've known of love. Few have channelled so well the skittering beats and transcendent air of dub music as Crooks does in her semi-autobiographical debut... Startlingly vivid reading Daily Telegraph, *Summer Reads of 2023* 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. You’re currently studying for a PhD in creative- critical writing . Has that changed how you go about your fiction?

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Stephen Buoro, 29, was born in Ososo, Nigeria, the fourth of six children. His father was a photographer, so their home was an artistic one, though the only books were religious texts. It wasn’t until Buoro won a scholarship to a missionary school, where children were caned for speaking any language other than English, that he learned to read. After earning a maths degree, he came to the UK to join the UEA’s creative writing MA as the recipient of the Booker prize foundation scholarship. Pod is told through the eyes of Ea, a spinner dolphin, and is a story about an ocean world increasingly haunted by the cruelty and ignorance of humans. Okojie said the book “speaks to climate change and is also a wonderful celebration of family”. She screamed at me, ‘Your feet! They’re dirty! You think you can just walk across the bare floor and get into my bed?’ There’s a slightly S&M feeling to writing in academia, where the premium on accuracy is just so high. Maybe it was a rebellion against that: I was like, am I allowed to do this?! And I thought, yeah, why not? His work means so much to me. One of the things he does really well is make you feel sorry for everybody. Everybody’s struggling, everybody’s messing everybody else up and punishing each other all the time. It’s part of being human. AC You can do serious time for stolen chequebooks,’ I say. ‘Who gave it to you? Do you know what they could have done to that woman?’