Rare Singles is a slim novel focusing on Earlon ‘Bucky’ Bronco, a seventy-something Black man living in Illinois, who cut a few soul records as a teenager but has spent much of the recent of his life working dead-end jobs and devoting his life to his wife Maybellene, who has recently died. Out of the blue, he receives a request to travel to Scarborough, a fading seaside resort in Northern England, to play a comeback show at a Northern Soul Weekender. Unbeknownst to Bucky, who was paid a derisory flat fee for his initial recordings so has no way of tracking their afterlives, his two ‘rare singles’ have become loved and treasured in the Northern Soul scene, which gave another life to many obscure releases from US soul singers on the Northern-English dancefloors (and to some extent, the UK charts) of the 70s and beyond.

Shy is a short novel, with experimental and poetic flourishes, focusing on the inner life of the titular adolescent Shy. We find him, in 1995, in the appropriately named ‘Last Chance’ school, an institution offering an unconventional home for troubled teenagers with a history of delinquent behaviour. At the start of the book he’s setting off with a bag weighed down with rocks, heading for the school’s pond in the middle of the night, with an obvious intention in mind. We explore his mindset through both present tense interior monologue, flashback, and snippets of commentary from other sources - a therapist’s words, the narration of a documentary being made about Last Chance, the taunts of his classmates, and the lyrics of contemporary Drum’n’Bass tracks - his one true passion.

Fire Rush is focused on Yamaye, a young woman of Jamaican heritage, living on the Tombstone Estate in suburban London in the late 1970s. Her mother is long gone, though remains a spectral presence in her life, and her father, while physically present, is cold and distant. She escapes into an underground culture of Caribbean music, centring on a local club called the Crypt, which is of course quite literally underground. She parties with her friends Asase and Rumer (the latter an Irish immigrant) and takes on the male-dominated club culture by developing her own knowledge of music and fierce line in lyrics which she begins to unleash at the Crypt. She meets a sensitive and romantic man, Moose, at the club, and the two fall in love and dream of escape to the Jamaican countryside