Fire Rush

Incantatory and immersive, Crooks’ triumphant debut is an expansive story about love, freedom, raving and the impact of police violence on Black communities, told with immense musicality and emotional honesty.

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize For Fiction 2023

Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2024

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

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.