‘Pick a fight with the media and win it,’ Tobias is advised by an associate. The politics of fear and division employed by the fictional Prime-Minister-to-be Tobias Durbridge are what we’re seeing daily. Crossfire, Malorie Blackman said in an interview with Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy, is ‘inspired by Brexit and Donald Trump’, and comes at a serious and near-dystopian political point for us in the West. When he and Sephy fall in love, the very worst trouble ensues.

That Noughts and Crosses is young adult fiction didn’t stop it from being a brazen political read the family of Callum are part of the Liberation Militia, a violent Nought-run organisation whose mission is to overthrow the Crosses.

We are watching racism play out openly, and are mainly powerless to it For the few of you who haven’t yet read it, the book follows Sephy (Persephone), a Cross whose father is a senior British politician, and Callum, one of the smartest Noughts in his year. Noughts and Crosses was written in response to the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, but rather than writing about race and racism in Britain plainly, as it was (and still is), Blackman decided to present an alternative Britain in which black people (Crosses) were ruling and in majority, and white people (Noughts) were the minority, and exist as second-class citizens. Take the plaster, transpose it to the western world, and you see just how on the money Malorie Blackman has been. If you ask anyone what they took away from Noughts and Crosses, first published in 2001, they’ll most likely say ‘the bit with the plaster’, and with it the realisation that nude plasters aren’t nude for… everyone.

We all know what they mean, and this is what Malorie Blackman is most skilled at telling the truth about the society that we live in by presenting a dystopia that is uncomfortably close to home. We’re used to this language of unsubtle but ‘polite’ racism in Britain, much like when The Daily Mail asked Stormzy why he couldn’t show ‘a scintilla of gratitude’ that he was born in a council house in Croydon after he rightly called out Theresa May’s non-response to the horrific tragedy that was Grenfell. ‘The Daily Shouter believes that our country is not ready for a Nought Prime Minister.’Ī line from the fictional newspaper in Crossfire, the fifth instalment of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses series.

Crossfire malorie blackman