• Incisive, humorous and heartbreaking oral histories of people living in formerly Communist countries holding fast to their former lives, from one of Poland’s finest journalists. • Like Anna Funder’s Stasiland or Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, readers are guided through the aftereffects of authoritarian rule and the challenges of freedom via Szablowski’s immediate, heartwrenching stories of the people who lived through the collapse of Communism. • The bold and brilliant allegory at the centre of Dancing Bears is of bears raised and trained by Bulgarian Gypsies. With the fall of Communism, the bears were released into a wildlife refuge. But even today, whenever the bears see a human, they still get up on their hind legs to dance. • Dancing Bears traces the remarkable true stories of people throughout Eastern Europe and Cuba who, like the bears, are now free, but seem nostalgic for a time when they were not. • Szablowski is an award-winning Polish journalist—his reportage on illegal immigrants flocking to the EU won the European Parliament Journalism Prize, and his previous book about Turkey, The Assassin from Apricot City, won an English PEN Award. • This book comes at a pivotal moment for oral histories, following the success of 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time. • For fans of Stasiland by Anna Funder, Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick and Tale of Two Cities by John Freeman.

A contemporary fable about a dancing bear, whose dreams of freedom keep her spirit alive despite the pain and degradation of her existence.

 The 20th century is new and Russia is on the cusp of revolutionary change. In London, Gregori Lohmatski, an ardent big game hunter and son of a Russian estate owner, is suddenly and urgently summoned home. On the estate two men have been killed by a man-eating bear. Gregori invites John Sherwood, his American hunting companion, to join him in pursuit of the man eating bear. Sherwood is unaware that the Lohmatski men have been rumored to have the ability to change into bears. Events in Russia become more than a bear hunt, as Sherwood and Gregori’s revolutionary minded sister flee across Russia pursued by the police and the attacking were-bear.

Detective Milo Dragovitch spends too much time boozing until he gets caught up in a case involving two-bit criminals and an old lady on the run. His friends call him Milo. No one has ever called him Bud except his father, long dead, and now Sarah Weddington, stirring painful memoires and offering him his first case since he abandoned his private practice and took a job marking time on the night shift for Haliburton Security. The case seems almost too easy, hardly worth the large fee, just to satisfy this old woman's curiosity. But things are soon exploding all over the place and Milo is turning up grenades, machine guns, a kilo of marijuana and a bag of coke . . . and suddenly Milo is on the run.

Mother Bear tries to persuade her young daughter Amy to stop dancing and go to bed with unexpected results.

Max, a dancing bear with the Moscow Circus, teaches his friend Boris how to dance.