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

A young woman is haunted by her childhood in this forcefully imaginative and unapologetically bleak novel from the author of Fire RushThe 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