Jacqueline Crooks grew up in 70s and 80s Southall, part of London's migrant community carving out a space through music, culture and politics. Fire Rush, her first novel, was shortlisted for multiple prizes including the Women's Prize for Fiction, Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Jhalak Prize. It won the PEN American Open Book Award and the Paul Torday Memorial Prize. It was also chosen as an Observer Best Debut Novel of the Year. For her short stories, a selection of which was published in the collection The Ice Migration, she has been nominated for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize and BBC National Short Story Award.
Hypnotically beautiful, almost weightless, Sky City is the literary equivalent of an out-of-body experience. In the best ways it pole-axed me. -- Louise Kennedy Sky City invites us fully into the texture of the 90s. Deeply enjoyable and carrying itself with a calm assurance, this is a novel that is built to last -- Roger Robinson In this rich, searching novel, Jacqueline Crooks writes with great skill and quiet acuity about how the past resists containment, returning in disquieting ways. It is an unsettling yet compassionate exploration of childhood trauma, threaded with the promise of love and redemption, and a lyrical hymn to London’s overlooked places of sanctuary -- Hannah Lowe Sky City is the soul electric, attuned to star-stuff in every word and in every cell of Jaycee's body. A heartbreaking but heartening tale that heals us. I adore this book, the world is transformed by it. -- Pascale Petit [A] riveting second novel, Crooks’ rhythmic, lyrical prose transports us to a North London housing estate in the 1990s, where three lives intersect to haunting effect… A richly textured story of trauma, friendship, loneliness and redemption, and an evocative portrait of ‘90s London * Bookseller, *Fiction Book of the Month* *