Ecstatic

An electrifying near-future novel about state control, collective resistance and the radical power of dance in a city on the brink.

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.