'The trendspotters were wrapped in mantles of newness, always in the know, always one step ahead of their culture, living perpetually at the gleaming edge of the present, where it sparks and glows fresh from the future's forge.'
Beautiful, ambitious sisters Ursula and Ivy operate at the extreme end of the capitalist spectrum: Ursula works in a marketing company as a trendspotter, trained to predict the minutest of changes in consumer trends; Ivy has entered the fiercely competitive world of modelling.
But when Ivy finds herself unable to reconcile material gain with the simple fact of exhibiting her body, she suffers a nervous breakdown and is committed to an asylum. There she becomes the "savage girl", entirely self-sufficient in her own, self-created universe. And with the trendspotters' need to slake and avaricious public's thirst for the "new", Ivy's mental breakdown is soon being marketed as the answer - the post-ironic answer, the only answer - to modern-day life.
With wit and innovation, 'The Savage Girl' charts the dynamic between the twins' radical points of view: between Ivy's rejection of the world and Ursula's anticipation of its appetites. Satirising consumer culture with a cool and imaginative hand, Alex Shakar plants a finger firmly on the pulse of the reaction against capitalism.
