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Wildfire Books has landed the second novel by Moses McKenzie, author of An Olive Grove in Ends (Wildfire), which won the 2023 Hawthornden Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award, and the inaugural Soho House Breakthrough Writer Award.
Editorial director Ella Gordon acquired world all-language rights to Fast by the Horns from Anne-Marie Doulton at the Ampersand Agency. It will publish 9th May 2024.
Set in the tight-knit community of St Pauls, Bristol in 1980, Fast by the Horns follows 14-year-old Jabari, the only son of revered community leader Ras Levi. Raised in a world of sus laws (stop and search) and council neglect, Jabari finds hope in his Rastafari faith, which offers the comforting vision that one day he and his fellow believers will repatriate to the motherland, where they will at last be free from oppression and prejudice. But in St Paul’s a local firebrand activist has been arrested, and violence soon overflows, pulling both father and son into its maelstrom. As Jabari rages against the iniquity, a chance encounter with a young Black child gifts him an opportunity for justice – or is it revenge?
Gordon said: “Working on Olive Grove was a labour of love and career highlight for me, and I wondered how we’d ever repeat that experience. But Fast by the Horns is entirely its own thing: we still have the vivid Bristol setting and rich cast of characters, but the mood of this book is completely fresh. Set at an overlooked but significant moment in this country’s history, and centring on a community underrepresented in British fiction, it’s a unique, engrossing novel by one of the most exciting young voices in literature right now. I’m hugely excited about it.”
McKenzie added: ‘Iyaric, the Rastafari language, is one that has rarely been concerned with the permanence of literary depiction. This has made the writing of this novel – encapsulating not only the language, but the time and culture in which it flourished – feel both important and engaging.”