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The Wickedest
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Narrated by:
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Caleb Femi
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By:
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Caleb Femi
About this listen
The Wickedest features sound design and special effects to enhance your listening experience. Listen out for the reverb of the DJ's shout-outs and the swell of the crowd.
One of The Guardian's Best Poetry Books of 2024
"Atmospheric and intoxicating, lyrical and inviting, The Wickedest is a heady night in the dance, and Caleb Femi is the life of the literary party."—Candice Carty-Williams, author of Queenie
“Caleb Femi is a gift to us all from the storytelling gods. He is a poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy.”—Max Porter, author of Shy
An immersive epic taking place over one night at an underground London house party, conjured by a multi-hyphenate sensation.
Welcome to the Wickedest, the longest running house party in the South London shoob scene, always held at an undisclosed inner-city spot. You better hope you have the address: this is for locals only.
Sweaty and cinematic, pulsing with rhythm and heat, every moment here—from one-on-one intimacies to the swell of the party’s collective roar—is refracted in Caleb Femi’s writing. Ingeniously blending conversations, text messages, sonnets, vignettes, monologues, photos, and lyrics, The Wickedest is a modern epic, told as a minute-by-minute chronicle of an unforgettable night out.
Femi, a multi-hyphenate sensation and the author of Poor, which was called “a landmark debut for British poetry” by The Guardian, is a generational storyteller and scene setter. But The Wickedest does more than tell the story of one party; Femi uses the experience of nightlife to document the broader contexts surrounding the shoobs—the marginalization of low-income communities of color, the red tape that bars those on the edges from already shrinking communal space. Still, the party goes on. The Wickedest is a respite and a reckoning, a community of desire, care, and resistance that carries on long past the night’s end.
©2025 Caleb Femi (P)2025 Macmillan AudioCritic reviews
"Hypnotic and freewheeling . . . The book captures the sensual chaos of dance and the sociopolitical dynamics of a clubhouse culture where Black working-class communities share a common rhythm of grief and euphoria . . . Wickedest celebrates the process of making and making up when art confronts change."—Kit Fan, The Guardian
"[The Wickedest] spins an ecstatic story of one night in South London’s underground party scene . . . Throughout, Femi gleefully evokes the sense of liberation found by the partygoers as they free themselves of the weight of reality. It’s a blast."—Publishers Weekly
‘In The Wickedest, Femi draws on his skills as a photographer as well as a poet to encapsulate the house party experience in a book that’s stylish and wittily curated—complete with floor plan, screen grabs of text messages, even a “Promotion Risk Assessment Form” from London’s Metropolitan Police, anarchically completed. It is fun, optimistic and beautiful to look at."—Maria Crawford, Financial Times
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