The Dancing Bear

The Dancing Bear

<p><i>‘You don’t want to mind about any of this,’ said the driver, waving a hand at the grey ruins and the greyer dust. ‘In a few days you’ll be so used to it that you’ll like them. Berlin’s a grand place! I’d rather be here than anywhere else in the world, and that’s a fact.’</i></p><p>‘No more perceptive portrait of Germany in defeat has been etched in word than Frances Faviell’s first book, <i>The Dancing Bear</i>, which made so powerful an impact upon me that I read it in a single sitting.’ Guy Ramsey, <i>Daily Telegraph</i></p><p>‘Berlin during the decisive years from 1946 to 1949. … The prostitution which paid so handsomely; the black market which brought in rich rewards, although it meant that the Berliners had to part with treasured possessions; the night clubs which catered for still baser tastes; the impoverished intellectuals and the starving professors and the poor who had only their wits with which to eke out a bare sustenance—all this and much else the author describes with insight, incisiveness, and realism.’<br /><i>Times Literary Supplement</i></p><p>‘There is great charity in this book; there is the sharp, limpid eye of the artist; there is sound realism; and there is an unswerving, passionate desire to tell the truth.” John Connell, <i>Evening News</i></p><p>‘They were hard and terrible times, and brilliantly does Frances Faviell describe them for us. We meet the Altmann family and follow their joys and troubles. … The book is a brilliant pen-picture of the post-war years. We have British, French, American and Russian characters, but the background is always Berlin, and the strange tunes to which its bear danced.’ <i>Liverpool Daily Post</i></p><p>This new edition includes an afterword by Frances Faviell’s son, John Parker, and other supplementary material.</p>