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

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I was and am nervous about the current administration in India because the book is very critical of them and their ideology and what it is doing to artists and journalists, activists. I am curious to see how it is received. I hope that it gets its space and that it is allowed to be read and no one faces any kind of trouble for supporting it. My family and friends, my publisher. Penguin India. It impacts everyone… bookstores that carry books that are controversial. Yamaye lives for the weekend, when she can go raving with her friends at The Crypt, an underground club on the outskirts of London. Then everything changes. Yamaye meets Moose, who she falls deeply in love with, and who offers her the chance of freedom and escape.

Fire Rush by Jaqueline Crooks is my fourteenth read off the 2023 Women’s Prize longlist and while this was an extremely distinctive and richly written novel it wasn’t one that fully resonated with me. I absolutely hate that I didn't love this book because I felt like the writing was done beautifully and that the author conveyed the setting and conditions of Jamaicans in London during "Babylon" quite well, especially for her debut novel. But I have to be honest and say that for me it was just okay. I think that part of the reason is that the dialect threw me off at times and that is an issue with me, not everyone. There were times I just didn't know what was being said even though I tried. So it was slow going for me and I really struggled with it. My partner. He’s a psychotherapist and he was really helpful in talking to me about what it meant for these girls not to have a father. He’s not an overpraiser and he doesn’t read commercial fiction – he’ll reread Heart of Darkness on holiday – but he said: “I think you’ve got something here.”

I was blown away by Fire Rush - an exceptional and stunningly original novel by a major new writer... Her mesmerising, imaginative and 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 and changed and already longed to reread it Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER

The list is completed by Pod by Laline Paull, who was previously shortlisted for the prize in 2015 for her novel The Bees. That garment’s gonna be the price of a second-hand Spitfire,’ Rumer says. ‘Probably get you inna jus’ as much trouble.’ 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.I loved writing the scene where Yamaye is driving the getaway car, evading the police and speeding through the streets of Bristol. In fiction, it’s often the men at the wheels of the car or the plane or running ahead and leading the way. I had an experience that was very similar to that scene where I was driving a car with three men who were getting away from a gang. So I enjoyed drawing on that experience and using artistic licence to bring in elements of history where women used their bodies as vessels to escape slavery. 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. 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?’