Sky City cover art

Sky City

The dazzling new novel from the Women’s Prize-shortlisted author of Fire Rush
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Sky City

By: Jacqueline Crooks
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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

A spellbinding portrait of 90s London and three lives brought together by chance, from the Women’s Prize-shortlisted author of Fire Rush

*Guardian book to read 2026*

London in the 90s. After years in a hostel for young homeless women, Jaycee finally has a room of her own high up in Sky City, a housing estate in north London carved out of the glow-in-the-dark sky. But the past is not so easily forgotten and her childhood continues to haunt her. When an old classmate, Sol, reappears, he seems to offer her a lifeline. Sol was her first love, and the only person who looked out for Jaycee when they were kids. Can she trust him now?

Her best friend from the hostel is Ella-G, who has left London for the glamorous world of the New York music scene. Both Jaycee and Ella-G are daughters in search of fathers. When Jaycee finds a rare record that seems to lead to Ella-G’s father, the two women go searching for answers in Atlantic City. What Jaycee encounters there brings her to the edges of her identity. Back in London, she finally begins to confront the traumas of her own past. But can she find justice and healing, even as her, Sol, Ella-G's worlds threaten to crash together and splinter apart?

© Jacqueline Crooks 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 City Life Friendship Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Urban Women's Fiction World Literature
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Critic reviews

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)
Jacqueline Crooks is the rare groove of literature - she writes with a rhythm, imagination and unique language that makes even the searing pain of this novel transcendent (Afua Hirsch)
Poetic, truthful and powerful, Sky City gives glittering insight into a wounded black female subjectivity, offering agency and empathy. A beautiful read (Diana Evans)
Shimmering and kaleidoscopic, Sky City is an exhilarating, compelling story that goes deep into the self, and what it is to feel human (Priscilla Morris)
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 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)
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
A luminous novel. Crooks captures the textures of Black British life in the 80s and 90s with tenderness, fury, and breathtaking prose (Jacob Ross)
Gorgeously redemptive, and hugely courageous. Enter Sky City to hear the rare grooves and taste the soul food of 90s London, and meet three people so tenderly, so irrefutably, alive they will overflow your heart with their brightness and passion (Alice Hiller)
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