This was a really fantastic book with powerful themes and resonant language. It may take you a while to get the 'riddim' of the Jamaican patois, but I didn't find it too long. (I looked up some words out of interest, but you could get 90% of it from context). The patois adds a real element to the book; it feels vibrant and almost like poetry at times. Crooks has represented the rhythm of music - mostly dub reggae, but also traditional music - through her words and it is mesmerically effective. You really feel like you are there jivin with the girls, the beat pulsin ya body. I was truly transported. Fire Rush is now the fourth book I've completed in my quest to read the Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist for this year. I loved it, though maybe a touch less than Trespasses by Louise Kennedy. 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. Far be it from us to say you saw it here first. Patel, who signed with the tiny indie press Rough Trade Books when “no one else was listening”, now says: “I was coming from so far outside the publishing world; the industry felt very remote and extremely closed. No one knew about I’m a Fan, which was basically DIY; that list, which everyone pays attention to, legitimised a book that didn’t have the machine behind it.” That garment’s gonna be the price of a second-hand Spitfire,’ Rumer says. ‘Probably get you inna jus’ as much trouble.’

Because nowhere’s safe–not the streets, governed by police with barbed-wire veins; not our homes, ruled by men with power fists as misshapen as their wounds. The only place to live and rage from is our hearts.” 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 I’m on board with a lot of what they’re saying; I didn’t want the reader to feel they were cranks. The narrator’s intrigued by their views but he’s banished from them – I wanted to capture the sense I’ve sometimes had of feeling excluded from causes like that. Having empathy is one thing but there’s a gift of righteous anger that comes from being brutalised by your political enemies. If you’re middle class, white and male, it’s just not available to you. Music is a powerful force in Crooks’ incendiary debut novel, echoing the rhythms in the life of a young woman just beginning to find her voice. Set in the late 1970s and early ’80s, this is the story of Yamaye, who lives in a run-down housing complex with her Jamaican father outside London. Yamaye sleepwalks through her dull factory job, coming alive when she and her friends head to the Crypt, an underground club that thrives on darkness, sweat, and the driving beats of dub reggae. There are other spaces in which she feels safe—the local record shop, the Pentecostal church—but Yamaye is well aware that all such refuges are controlled by unyielding men. Though she dreams of making music herself, she's mostly content to dream and enjoy the escape dancing provides. Then one night she meets Moose, a thoughtful carpenter whose stories about his grandmother in Jamaica make her ache for the past and her own missing mother, who fled London when Yamaye was a child. Their romance blossoms, and Moose reveals possibilities she hadn’t considered. But love is not a shield, and when tragedy strikes, Yamaye is forced to confront the realities shaping her existence: racism, sexism, poverty, fear. Crooks creates unforgettable characters here, fleshed out with empathy and wisdom, and she writes in a lyrical style, expertly shaping Yamaye’s evolution from “Tombstone Estate gyal” to fierce, proud woman determined to liberate herself from perceived limitations and male aggression. “It always takes me time to realise someone’s hurting me,” she thinks. “A few minutes, a day, a year. Twenty-four years. Four hundred years.” Once awakened, however, Yamaye will be vigilant, dancing joyfully to her own beat.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.” I think it was the predominant use of music and patois that had me struggling a bit with Fire Rush. While both these things gave the story such a strong voice, I couldn’t easily connect with the musical references and found the dialogue hard to understand at times. I could feel how beautifully the language washed over me but it ultimately just wasn’t for me. Tombstone’s oppressed youth find their oppositional voice, inflected with Jamaican English, spinning tunes and flinging down lyrics in the male-dominated Crypt. The men have competition in Yamaye, whose musical talent underlines an unspoken truth: “Man preach revolution but woman carry its sound.” Yamaye is also grieving for her mother, who took off for Guyana when she was a child, and is now presumed dead. She’s been raised by Irving, her caustic father, who mostly spared her the rod but whose “belt used to be his tongue”. Sumptuous, richly detailed, chilling and ingenious, Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait boldly reveals from the start that its 15-year-old protagonist is going to be murdered. Set against the male power and politics of Renaissance Italy, this is the story of Lucrezia, a young woman with spirit and intelligence who is forced into a marriage and refuses to be subdued by her husband Alfonso, Duke of Ferrari. None of us could put this immaculate masterpiece down.

Remarkable... In terms of sheer lyrical force it stands head and shoulders above most debuts Daily Telegraph However, it is certainly worth it: to see the world of late 1970s into the 80s, the vibe that was going on, Yamaye's growth as a character, the beauty and darkness of others' souls, to explore Afrofuturism, and to be taken on a real emotional rollercoaster. Use of recurring images, and other forms of text (such as rapping/singing) really take this book to the next level. Thanks to NetGalley and Vintage for the arc of this book and thank you to Jacqueline Crooks for such an exciting new voice in fiction! Second, I would like to spend the weekend away with Herbert Peters. Herbert Peters is based on Peter Herbert OBE, the barrister and political activist who fights against racism and injustice (He gave me permission to draw on his life and also helped with research). I’d like to spend the weekend find out more about what drives him to stay on the front line of activism, taking on superstructures. I’d like to find out more about his work, especially in the 1970s. I’d like to find out what he thinks about Fire Rush and the position of women on the front line who experience violence from within their own community. I like to know whether he thinks fiction can have a political impact and be the starting point for communication and engagement between opposing ideas or people.I met my maternal Indian grandfather in Jamaica for the first time in 1988. He was the son of Indian indentured labourers. I was fascinated by this Indian man in a rural sugar plantation village in Jamaica and the hybridity of his life. He was blind, and we spent a lot of time talking about his life. He was a living archive, and I was inspired to write his life story as a way of archiving it. I played with the idea for many years and started going to small writing workshops, but I didn’t start writing anything properly until 2000. The more I researched my family’s history, the more I became entranced by my ancestors, and I started to write about my great-grandparents. Eventually, the stories became a collection of short stories spanning Siberia, India, Germany, Jamaica, and England as I explored my family’s history and geography. It was a way of exploring the hybridity of my own life as an Indo-Caribbean Jamaican woman living in London and straddling multiple cultures.