(c) Maxim Vinciguerra
Sky City is your second novel. Who is Jaycee, and what major change happens in her life at the beginning of the story?
Jaycee is a Jamaican-heritage woman still living with the effects of childhood harm, relying on the survival strategies of her mind and the transcendental pull of music. She moves slightly outside of the world, yet styles it out—with beautiful clothes and a cool exterior—passing as just another young woman in the city, working and living her life. In reality, she is trying to rebuild a life that feels safe enough to fully inhabit.
The novel's beginning finds Jaycee, who had stayed in a hostel for young homeless women for years, residing in a high-up flat in Sky City. It’s a strange place, elevated, almost unreal, mirroring Jaycee’s psychic state: suspended between reality and dissociation, on the edge of disappearance into other worlds. Sky City opens up a fresh start for her, and feels like a kind of freedom, but it’s also a precarious place from which the past still somehow finds her.
How could Jaycee’s experiences help explore the idea of “healing”?
For me, healing in this novel is not a neat recovery narrative. There is no single method. Jaycee, though she isn’t yet aware of it, is creating her own decolonised programme of healing. She develops rituals: dancing, listening to rare groove on pirate radio. Gradually, she opens herself to spiritual and professional guidance. Throughout the story, she follows the signs, tuning into them, moving tentatively on a journey of healing.
It’s about accepting who we are in our entirety: the hurting parts, the strange parts, the wondrous parts that emerge from life’s challenges, the parts of ourselves we might otherwise try to hide.
The novel suggests that healing can only really take place when we’re empowered to shape our own way through it. There’s no definitive model. Instinct, heritage and culture all play a part. What Jaycee is learning, gradually, is how to trust herself: to recognise what feels right for her, and to follow that. That act of trust, of returning to her own instincts, is itself part of the healing.
How does the setting of 1990s London shape the themes of the story? How different would it be in today’s setting?
The 1990s setting is integral to the novel because it allows me to explore the emotional and social texture of the city at a particular moment in time—as I experienced it: a London shaped by urban loneliness, fragile connections, homelessness, and the sound worlds of pirate radio. It’s a city on the cusp of the digital era, when digital music and other technologies were just beginning to emerge. That sense of transition mirrors Jaycee’s own inner movement, from dissociative states towards a more integrated sense of herself.
This was an era where people formed relationships through physical presence: they met by rivers, visited each other's homes, and experienced the city and it's changing seasons side-by-side. There was a physical intimacy to those interactions, but also a vulnerability. Connections could be easily lost; people could disappear from one another’s lives without trace, because there was no Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn to find them again. That analogue world meant people could move between worlds unnoticed, something that closely reflects Jaycee’s own experience of dissociation.
There was limited access to information about support services. Pirate radio becomes crucial in that context: it is Jaycee’s information network, her advice centre, a connective and imaginative space that offers a sense of belonging she can’t find elsewhere in the city.
In a contemporary setting, the story would feel different. Digital visibility would offer Jaycee access to online services and support groups, but how meaningful that connection might be is open to question. The isolation would still exist, but in another form: less about disappearance, perhaps, and more about being visible and still not truly seen.
How might music and culture influence identity?
Music in Sky City operates as a site of transmission. Both Fire Rush and Sky City explore otherworldly forms of communication. When you cannot be fully seen or heard, you begin to turn to other channels, such as music, the ether, and other worlds.
There is a Black diaspora dimension to this. In trying to return to herself, Jaycee is also trying to reconnect with her Jamaican cultural inheritance through music. Music gives rhythm to her inner life, but it also carries memory, heritage, and a means of emotional regulation. It opens up the possibility of a way back to a lost self. Rare groove, spiritual jazz, and Afrofuturist funk function as technologies of healing. The cultural forms that make survival and self-recognition shape identity in the novel. Music is a way of asserting identity—of claiming your humanity—in the face of silencing, denial, and othering.
Alongside music, books also influence identity. They are portable objects of solidarity, carrying histories of resistance and offering support for struggles around belonging and identity, including migrant justice, LGBTQ+ rights, and women’s rights.
Can you create a soundtrack (5 songs) that could match the mood of the novel?
Sky City has a 34 track playlist. Each track accords with a chapter of the book, ordered according to the unfolding of the story.
- For A Child — Michael McDonald. This is attached to the opening chapter, it foreshadows the novel’s early atmosphere of vulnerability and danger.
- Lovely Sky Boat — Alice Coltrane. This song feels right for Jaycee’s suspended, aerial, hovering consciousness in Sky City.
- Who We Are – Ashley Henry- this is one of the central questions of the novel. A woman trying to find out who she is through the people she loves. Ashley’s outstanding album was played on repeat throughout the writing of later drafts of the novel.
- Life on Mars — Dexter Wansel. Dexter Wansel’s music is probably the single biggest influence on the novel. I was drawing directly on the Life on Mars album in the early drafts of Sky City. It became the foundational sound. It represents the cosmic, Afrofuturist, city-as-outer-space pulse that I wanted to convey.
- Forget me Nots – Patrice Rushen. Jaycee is trying to reach out to the people she has loved and lost. She doesn’t forget them. She fights for reconnection and love and in doing so she’s fighting for her survival.
The soundscape moves between rare groove, spiritual jazz, cosmic funk and tracks that feel slightly unearthly, because that is Jaycee’s emotional register.
If there’s one feeling or idea you want to stay with readers, what would it be?
I think the idea is that a person can be significantly affected by what has happened to them and still be capable of embarking on a journey of healing. Healing is possible when we can develop our own programme, moving at our own pace.
What keeps you hopeful when exploring difficult themes in your work?
A belief that writing and reading are survival practices. I’m drawing on a survivor's imagination that feels like a kind of superpower, capable of transforming difficult life experiences into art. That gives me hope. As well as dessert—which features a lot in the story—although I’m not allowed to eat a lot of sugar anymore. Music keeps me hopeful. Music, writing, and dancing are all reparative practices. Perhaps that’s why there’s always an undercurrent of music in my work.
What types of stories are you most drawn to tell next?
I’m currently working on a memoir centred on four Jamaican father-figures in my life. I’m exploring how Black Caribbean fathers parent their daughters, and how those relationships are shaped by history and colonial power. I’m drawing more deliberately on archives, family history and the history of empire, as I explore the ways history lives on in the body. I’m also still writing short stories. I can’t resist them. They allow me to range widely across different terrains, and help me locate the consciousness of the novels and books I’m working towards.
About the author
Jacqueline Crooks grew up in 70s and 80s Southall, part of London's migrant community carving out a space through music, culture and politics. Immersed in the gang underworld as a young woman, she later discovered the power of writing and music to help her look outwards and engage differently with the world - a power that has driven her ever since, from her work with charities to her short stories, which have been nominated for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Wasafiri New Writing Prize and the BBC National Short Story Award.