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This article examines the representation of the council estate in Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018) and Nikesh Shukla’s Run, Riot (2018) using a geocritical lens. Both novels feature violent and exclusionary spaces where young adults exist in liminal states akin to Agamben’s ‘bare life’. The lack of agency experienced by the characters in these novels is rendered ever more salient through themes of surveillance and hypervisibility. Yet, these novels also subvert representations of the housing estate, by depicting it as a heterogeneous and multi-dimensional site, particularly exemplified through the emancipatory potential offered by rap and grime music. Ultimately, these novels challenge the compartmentalisation of BAME fiction and offer new ways of thinking about the inner city in contemporary British literature.