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**LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE 2023**

Love changes everything in Fire Rush, the unforgettable novel about Black womanhood chosen as a Top 10 New Novel in 2023 by the Observer

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

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

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

5* READER REVIEWS:

‘I will be recommending it to everyone’

‘A phenomenal debut novel’

‘Yamaye is a fantastic central protagonist … This novel takes you on an emotional and unforgettable journey’

‘This book has it all … You’re immersed into something really special’

‘A stunning debut novel… as relevant to today’s racial climate as the 1970s… it felt musical, with dub music almost a secondary character in the novel’

Publisher Review

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 re-read it. -- Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER This beautiful, sprawling narrative is wrought with an incredible precision and a musicality which carries every sentence. Crooks' novel haunts but make space for hope as well. -- Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of OPEN WATER A brilliant, exuberant novel. Full of beauty, musicality and feminist power. -- Irenosen Okojie, author of NUDIBRANCH Fire Rush... [is] a window into the dub scene at the time, with rhythmic, lyrical writing and a story about raving, love and the impact of police violence. * Vogue *