Bøker av Jolie Booth

"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

Seven years on and Esmeralda has returned - perhaps a little wiser - but certainly not ruling the world... Yet. This sade-sati, or seven year cycle, has been her toughest to date, facing the reality of an adulthood that didn't turn out to be all it had been cracked up to be; call-centres, depression and infertility had certainly not been part of the 'Grand Plan'. But perhaps planning had been the problem all along and that 'plans' are no use to anyone, other than being a good joke for God. As with the 'Fool' in the tarot deck, eternally stepping off of the cliff edge into the unknown, so too has our dear Esmeralda found herself falling into the abyss, discovering all her sense of control over the universe was nothing more than an illusion. But in doing so Esmeralda has also discovered that sometimes when you fall... You fly. In her first book of the Saturn Returns series, The Girl Who'll Rule The World, Jolie Booth introduced us to Esmeralda, although "introduced" is perhaps too polite and formal a term to apply to a process akin to being sucked into a howling vortex of hedonism, sex, drugs and partying, then being shot of out the other end like a cork in a wind tunnel. In this book, however, Esmeralda is older, though not necessarily always wiser. Seven years have elapsed, during which time she has undergone experiences as varied as living in a famous (infamous) squat in Berlin, and touring Europe with a troupe of fools and mummers, struggling to make a living in the world of performing arts. Although Esmeralda does indeed always suffer fools gladly, her journey through life has by no means been smooth. Fate is always willing to don the Jester's cap, and pull the rug out from under her. Too young, and much too unconventional to suffer a mid-life crisis, she's nevertheless been forced to confront many issues in her existence which can no longer be ignored or avoided. Marriage. Commitment. Children. She squares up to these challenges with her customary mix of crashing ahead, impulsively, smashing into hard, emotionally-charged situations, and sometimes, harking back to the old days of crashing out, in a haze of substances. Once more, Jolie Booth has created a detailed and believable chronicle of a complicated character who you can't help but love and feel for, infuriating though she often is. And in her unflinching confrontation of the physical and emotional pain of the difficulties of child-bearing, she has produced some of her finest writing yet. If The Girl Who'll Rule The World was Fifty Shades for the Trainspotting Generation, then Never Worn is what happens when you substitute Sylvia Plath for Bridget Jones. "A richly detailed and relatable journey of hedonism and heartbreak, parties and penises and a growing maturity as the main character moves through her 30's. When the heartache of infertility comes to the forefront, this becomes a touching and, at times, painful read which is hard to acknowledge, but raw and so important." - Rebecca Fire