When a government curfew silences a city, one woman risks everything to make it dance again.

























'Passionate and compulsive' Esther Freud, author of Hideous Kinky





 

























In a near-future London gripped by heat, unrest and state control, Lois refuses to let the body be regulated. When the right to assemble is revoked and the city turns brittle with violence, she plans an illegal three-day 'long dance' inside a crumbling East End church. What begins as an act of liberation will ripple through the lives of five strangers, with consequences none of them can foresee.

Ecstatic is a fierce, lyrical novel about freedom and control, intimacy and collective release. It captures a city on edge and the underground communities that refuse to surrender joy. At once political and deeply human, it asks what happens when we lose touch with our bodies, and what it might cost to reclaim them.



Emily Woof is a writer, actor and director from Newcastle upon Tyne. Her novels The Whole Wide Beauty (2010) and The Lightning Tree (2015) were published by Faber to wide acclaim. She has written extensively for stage, screen and radio, including the plays Sex III, Revolver, Going Going (Royal Festival Hall/Southbank Centre) and Blizzard (Soho Theatre). She wrote and directed Meeting Helen for FilmFour and the award-winning short Between the Wars, and has written several dramas for BBC Radio 4. As an actor, her credits include The Full Monty, Velvet Goldmine, Vera and Mothering Sunday. She lives in London with her family.



'Passionate and compulsive'



'This beautiful and compelling novel is a paean to the power of dance … an exhilarating journey into a world where ecstatic dance just might hold the key to the future of humanity. You won't want to put it down – except to get up and dance'



'Powerful, raw and fearless. I love how it invokes the wild feminine energies of chaos and design, destruction and renewal, death and rebirth. A remarkable achievement'



'Remarkable … Woof's prose is limpid and soaring. I don't know of any other texts on this particular form of dance/spiritual practice that are able to capture so vividly the experience'



'Timely, vivid and important – I loved this novel and couldn't put it down'