Book description
**Winner of the 2020 Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award**
Jay Bernard's extraordinary debut is a fearless exploration of the New Cross Fire of 1981, a house fire at a birthday party in which thirteen young black people were killed.
Dubbed the 'New Cross Massacre', the…
- Coming soon!
Why read it?
1 author picked Surge as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Jay Bernard’s Surge is a collection of poems about the New Cross fire (1981) and the Grenfell fire (2017), and more broadly about Black British experience and identity. Their poetry is disciplined and musical, and the poems are deeply infused with an evident love for those whose lives were lost in the two fires. The delicacy of attention paid to individual victims brings a profound human beauty to poems about terrible things. I have a lot of respect for what it must have cost to take on that love, together with the grief and anger that it necessarily entails.
From J.'s list on The best books that write about injustice in different ways.
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