Estella

Estella is bored, lonely and miserable, but on the plus side her unexciting life means that she has a good job, a house and hasn't been hospitalised for over a decade. When she meets famous young actor, Oscar Perez, he offers her a world of tempting opportunity. Will her mental health and security survive? Given the choice, would she want them to?

Estella experiences life intensely. She doesn't just feel her own vibrant and volatile emotions, but she also feels the moods and feelings of the people around her; sometimes she isn't sure if what she's feeling is her own experience or other people's. This can make life a challenge and in order to deal with the constant onslaught of transferred emotions, Estella has formed an effective strategy. She calls on the strengths of former versions of herself. When she needs confidence, her thirty-year-old self, younger, slimmer and more attractive takes charge with an assurance that today's Estella has lost. When she needs anger and outrage, her fourteen-year-old self comes forward with all the feisty defiance that the current Estella can only dream of. Estella holds within her seven magnificent versions of herself on which to call.

When Estella meets a distressed Oscar Perez, she feels immediate compassion for him as she's aware of the emotional crisis that he's facing. After she helps him out of a difficult situation, he adopts her as a talisman and Estella is suddenly drawn into an exciting world that fulfils all her dreams, but at what cost to her mental health and the world that she has fought hard to build for herself?

This fast-paced, moving and often amusing novel explores the experience of a highly sensitive person (HSP) and how openness to emotional atmospheres can affect mental health and the ability to regulate one's own mood and decision making. We journey with Estella from sterile stability through crisis and emotional turmoil to finding a way to heal and thrive. Finally, we witness the birth of Estella's eighth version and the start of the next stimulating phase of her life.

Lara Latcham has used personal experience as an HSP as well as decades of experience with mental health and working with young people to craft a story that entertains and informs whilst inspiring people to free themselves from the limits imposed by holding on to traumatic experiences.

Lara's characters, Estella and Oscar, have both been holding on to anger and emotional wounds that have remained unresolved for years and which have caused their lives to become unsatisfactory and limited. They have both developed protective strategies that go some way to insulate them from daily upset, but which have isolated them from friends and family. When they are both forced to step out of their comfort zones, the real test begins. Will they find a way to move forward and start living without limitations?

While Estella embraces a spiritual pathway to release her anger and unhappiness, Oscar puts his faith in Estella to save him, imposing an enormous burden on their nascent friendship. As Estella grows in emotional strength and self-knowledge, Oscar's anger increases as he feels her slipping away from him. Estella is playing a dangerous game, but she has no idea how damaging the consequences might be. Will her new-found emotional strength allow her to overcome Oscar's punishment? Will she be able to keep the absorbing new life that Oscar has helped her to discover, or will she lose it and Oscar and return to the sterile stability of her former existence?

Despite tackling difficult and emotive themes, Estella also offers an exciting story, and compelling characters with whom readers will empathise and relate. Readers who enjoy the novels of Meena Van Praag, Ruth Hogan and Sarah Winman will enjoy Estella with its blend of the everyday and the magical, the mundane and the exceptional. Readers will be delighted by this dramatic and uplifting story.