Keith Dewhurst

Dancing Bear Keith Dewhurst

London, 1980s. It's colourful and fast. It's also dangerous if you've got no money and don't know where to go.

And it's a changing city. A city of contrasts: big money being poured into big dreams by men in sharp suits and fast cars. Alongside the developers, politicians vie for glory and think their moment has come. And on the same streets overlooked by their penthouses, lives are lost and homelessness grows.

Fighting to find herself in this vivid new world is Claudia and her alter ego, Bunty. The bailiffs are after her, she's broke but not beaten: the big time still beckons and Claudia hasn't quite lost sight of her acting dreams.

Meanwhile young Wozzer arrives in the city's crazy midst. A stranger to the streets, he's lost his home but not his starpilot heart.

When Claudia and Wozzer's paths cross at London's Camelot restaurant, Claudia recognises a fellow lost soul in need and invites Wozzer to stay. An unlikely friendship blossoms that will underscore their chaotic, heady lives for years to come.

Author Keith Dewhurst spent a good deal of his life divided between London and Sydney, Australia. He returned to the UK at the end of the 1980s after a five year absence, finding himself surprised and confused by how much the country had changed. In an effort to come to terms with those changes, Dancing Bear began to emerge, and was written over the course of the next thirty years.

A cautionary, contemporary tale of small epic lives played out over three decades as one millennium ends and another begins.