Ecstatic
London is buckling under the strain of political tension, social disorder, and endless heat.
During a long sweltering summer, we follow five characters as they search for meaning, love and hope during a time of crisis.
We move through different urban worlds of ecstatic dance, Art, AI, and therapy as their lives become entangled with each other.
The novel asks how a single act of embodied rebellion can transform those who join it and what it means to feel alive in an uncertain, chaotic world.
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“
This beautiful and compelling novel is a paean to the power of dance....You won't want to put it down - except to get up and dance.
Henry Shukman
Inspiration
I wanted to write about the moving body. It led me to explore the lives of the many different kinds of people who dance, and the reasons they do so, in a culture that often marginalises it into spectacle. I found people from all walks of life and across the generations who dance in London and became fascinated by urban shamanism and alternative belief systems. As I wrote, I found the pressures of today’s world - climate anxiety, political instability, questions about art, technology and control, becoming part of the story.
The novel grew into something larger: a story about isolated people in a time of relentless change pushed to the very brink, desperate for connection in a society where the old order is dying but nothing new, nothing good, has yet come to take its place.
Dance became both the subject and the answer - a way of thinking, resisting, and of creating a collective energy which might stand up to power.
Early Praise
"In a fractured, alienated, atomised city, what soars and entrances is her characters’ faith in the physical, the somatic, in human connection through art, ritual and above all through the dance that weaves through the novel with a feverish, hallucinatory intensity ... a wonderful novel"
Frank Wynne
"Emily Woof is a passionate and compulsive writer. She truly is master of the dance"
Esther Freud
"Powerful, raw and fearless. I love how Ecstatic invokes the wild feminine energies of chaos and design, destruction and renewal, death and rebirth. A remarkable achievement"
Ayala Gill - Living Into Love substack
"Outside her window the Thames ebbs and flows past the cement works at Woolwich. Rusting cranes stand blistering in the heat. The steel hoods that house the machinery of The Thames Barrier shine in the sun like armoured guards, spanning the width of the river and keeping watch over the tides. It is low now and the water flows calmly. All ten of the Barrier’s floodgates are open. "
