The Girl Who'll Rule the World

"Rich, idiosyncratic dialogue from the haphazard perspective of a girl on the cusp of womanhood" - Ophelia Bitz As with an Impressionist painting, where the image appears from the dots, the story of Esmeralda emerges from the chaos of the writing, revealing a twenty-first century woman trying to make sense of a world gone mad. Esmeralda is no girlie girl. She's a mean, not very lean, shagging machine. Her body is not a temple. It's a skip. How can we describe Esmeralda's life? Imagine Moll Flanders met Mrs Dalloway and they decided to drop some acid and dance all night at a party at a commune in Norwich. That'd be a start. Structurally, this novel challenges perceptions of time and memory. Mingling past and present, Esmeralda drifts downstream through a series of scenes peopled by a rambling, picaresque cast of characters. Some are fleeting ghosts never seen again while others retain significance throughout the stream of Esmeralda's consciousness. Actually, "drifts" is the wrong word. A more appropriate nautical metaphor would be that Esmeralda crashes through life like a rudderless speedboat, leaving havoc in her turbulent wake. No situation is too strange, no drug is off the menu, legal, illegal, or purely psychological. This book is Fifty Shades for the Trainspotting generation, Fear of Flying for the acid trippers or Bridget Jones for those who were so off their face they can't remember what happened yesterday. In this, her first novel, Jolie Booth, has given voice to a new strong woman, Esmeralda, who, with all her disasters, triumphs, certainties, resolutions and contradictions manages to fascinate all around her and hold the whip hand. Press Release A novel which has been ten years in the writing will finally see the light of day when it is published this month. Brighton-based author and theatre maker Jolie Booth has been working on the story since 2006. Concerning its publication, Jolie said... "When I began writing this novel in my late twenties it felt as if something was trying to escape from me and required only for me to get out of the way. Writing this book was an utter pleasure and a fond memory. It heavily influenced my life choices at the time. As is portrayed in the story, writing this novel really did spur me on to move into a room of one's own and live alone for the first time. They were some of the happiest years of my life and I'm joyful at having bothered to capture their essence in these pages and for the spirit of those years to still be accessible to me now. To get feedback, at the time, I printed some copies of the first draft and passed it around friends. Feedback was good, but I didn't feel compelled to do anything else with it. Then in 2015, nearly a decade later, three strangers contacted me to say they'd found copies of my text and they'd found the story relevant, insightful and inspiring. They urged me on. It felt like now was the time to act and the first publisher I sent it to wanted to publish it." So, what is it about? The first question anybody wants to know when they pick up a book is "what's it about?" but with this book, that's the hardest question you could ask about it, and the last one to be answered. As with an Impressionist painting, where the image emerges from the dots, in this book a story emerges from the chaos of the writing, revealing a Twenty-First Century woman trying to make sense of a world gone mad. A difficult concept to sum up, but OK, here's a summary... imagine if Moll Flanders met Mrs Dalloway and they both decided to drop some acid and dance all night at a party at a commune just outside Norwich? You're getting warmer. It's about Esmeralda. Life, and Esmeralda, but not necessarily in that order. Structurally, it's a novel that challenges our perceptions of time and memory, mingling past and present, as Esmeralda drifts downstream, through a series of scenes peopled with a rambling, picaresque cast of characters