Sky City by Jacqueline Crooks review – an ambitious, lyrical portrait of trauma

The world of Sky City never quite settles beneath your feet. The action of Jacqueline Crooks’s second novel unfolds in a recognisable 1990s London, yet everything seems subtly untethered from reality: a council estate suspended above the city, voices drifting in and out through pirate radio, ghosts walking beside the living. The narrative floats just above the surface of the everyday, a world where trauma transforms the mundane into something uncanny.

We first meet protagonist Jaycee 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 brand of cruelty. Families, Jaycee comes to believe, 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”. Eventually 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 turns out to be similarly brutal, and the pair survive together, forging a friendship that becomes the novel’s emotional anchor.

As adults, Jaycee and Ella-G could hardly seem more 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, meanwhile, propelled by her restless charisma, heads to the bright lights of 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 through Jaycee’s consciousness in fragments. She is haunted by Obsidia, a spectral child who comes to represent a version of herself.

The present-day narrative gathers 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 is after something more subtle than a conventional love story. Sol becomes another lost soul searching for belonging, his own 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 drawsJaycee into a quest that eventually takes her and Ella-G to Atlantic City in the search for a missing father, which becomes inseparable from Jaycee’s search for self.

Crooks’s prose, too, is deeply musical. Sentences swell and eddy in a dreamlike, rhythmic fashion, looping back on to 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: there is a near constant effluvium of loneliness, hanging 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.

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.

Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.