‘Fire Rush’ with Jacqueline Crooks

We are incredibly excited to welcome debut novelist Jacqueline Crooks to Mr B’s to discuss Fire Rush, already chosen as one of the Top Ten New Novels of 2023 by The Observer. A truly unforgettable novel about Black womanhood in the 1970s, Fire Rush sweeps through dance-halls and police riots across London, Jamaica, and Bristol.

Already proven a massive hit with the Mr B’s Team, we think this is one debut not to be missed and we hope you’ll join us for an evening as we welcome Jacqueline to the shop to chat to us.

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 – where she is caught up in a criminal gang and the police riots sweeping the country – and then to Jamaica, where past and present collide with explosive consequences.

‘I was blown away by Fire Rush … Mesmerising, imaginative and incantatory’ Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

‘Wrought with an incredible precision and a musicality which carries every sentence’ Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of Open Water