Jacqueline Crooks's second novel, Sky City, presents a world that never quite settles beneath your feet. Set in a recognisable 1990s London, the action unfolds in a reality subtly untethered: a council estate suspended above the city, voices drifting through pirate radio, and ghosts walking beside the living. The narrative floats just above the everyday, where trauma transforms the mundane into something uncanny.
A childhood marked by abuse
The protagonist, Jaycee, first appears as a child trapped in a west London housing estate she calls the Cyborg House. Her stepfather subjects her to horrific sexual abuse while her mother turns a blind eye, exercising her own cruelty. Jaycee comes to believe that families are “dangerous places … like nests of poisonous spiders, huddled in dark, undisturbed corners, their venom, a single drop enough to rot the body inside out.” Taken into care, she finds an unlikely lifeline in Ella-G, another damaged girl whose exuberance masks wounds as profound as Jaycee's own; both feel “on the outside of the world.” The care home proves similarly brutal, and the pair survive together, forging a friendship that anchors the novel emotionally.
Adult lives, divergent paths
As adults, Jaycee and Ella-G seem starkly different. Jaycee retreats into solitude in her high-rise council flat in Sky City, an estate perched above a shopping centre in north London where Crooks herself once lived. “Being alone is what it means to be at peace,” she tells herself. In a near-perennial state of dissociation, she imagines herself transformed by trauma into something less than fully human. Ella-G, propelled by restless charisma, heads to New York's music scene.
Through a conversation between past and present, Jaycee's childhood seeps into the contemporary narrative in shards of memory and recurring visions, her adult life continually interrupted by the child she once was. Crooks sketches this psychic dislocation with extraordinary imaginative force. The abuse reverberates in fragments, and she is haunted by Obsidia, a spectral child representing a version of herself.
Reunion and musical quest
The present-day narrative gains momentum when Jaycee unexpectedly reconnects with Sol, a boy who offered her a rare glimpse of tenderness at secondary school before circumstance tore them apart. Their reunion carries the promise of romance, yet Crooks aims for something more subtle than a conventional love story. Sol becomes another lost soul searching for belonging, his fractured identity mirroring Jaycee's.
As in her 2023 Women's prize-shortlisted debut, Fire Rush, music provides the novel's connective tissue and emotional scaffolding. An obscure blues record by a forgotten singer draws Jaycee into a quest that eventually takes her and Ella-G to Atlantic City in search of a missing father, which becomes inseparable from Jaycee's search for self.
Prose and bleakness
Crooks's prose is deeply musical. Sentences swell and eddy in a dreamlike, rhythmic fashion, looping back on recurring images before resolving into clarity. It takes a while to acclimatise, and at times the lyricism threatens to overwhelm the narrative. The novel's momentum can sag beneath the weight of its own poetic ambition.
Sky City is also unapologetically bleak: a near constant effluvium of loneliness hangs over the novel like the weather. Much of the narrative, as Crooks notes in the acknowledgments, is autobiographical. It feels as though she is refusing to soften or redeem her trauma for the reader's comfort. It is a reminder that adversity can be an enduring condition, not a narrative device on the way to catharsis.
A haunting meditation
Fire Rush announced a singular literary talent: a novelist capable of fusing the propulsive rhythms of dub music with the spiritual inheritance of African spiritualism, defying conventional realism. Sky City is, in many ways, even more ambitious. It is a haunting, polyphonic meditation on trauma and belonging that hovers between realism and dream, asking how a person might rebuild a self after childhood has shattered it.
