Showing results by author "Antonia Lloyd-Jones"

For hundreds of years, Bulgarian Gypsies trained bears to dance, welcoming them into their families and taking them on the road to perform. In the early 2000s, with the fall of Communism, they were forced to release the bears into a wildlife refuge. But even today, whenever the bears see a human, they still get up on their hind legs to dance. In the tradition of Ryszard Kapuściński, award-winning Polish journalist, Witold Szabłowski uncovers remarkable stories of people throughout Eastern Europe and in Cuba who, like Bulgaria’s dancing bears, are now free but who seem nostalgic for the time when they were not.

It begins with a tantalizing clue: a recent photograph taken of Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man - one of the most priceless masterworks ever plundered by the Nazis, which disappeared and was believed destroyed. Now, with proof of its existence, the Polish government wants it back. One wrong move and it could vanish forever. Because bound together with the missing artwork are secrets that have remained buried for a reason. 

All eyes are on famous prosecutor Teodor Szacki when he investigates a skeleton discovered at a construction site in the idyllic Polish city of Olsztyn. Old bones come as no shock to anyone in this part of Poland, but it turns out these remains are fresh, the flesh chemically removed. Szacki questions the dead man's wife, only to be left with a suspicion she's hiding something. Then another victim surfaces - a violent husband, alive but maimed - giving rise to a theory: someone's targeting domestic abusers.