The Last Dance Over the Berlin Wall

by Lisa Selvidge

In 1984, Johnny East, a dancer, is invited to West Berlin by mad Alice, an English girl living a bohemian life in the city at the heart of the Cold War. Alice is besotted with Johnny but on a trip to the East one day, Johnny meets and falls in love with a Russian tightrope walker in East Berlin. They begin an affair that leaves a trail of East-West transits, both legal and illegal, including one of the most daring crossings of the Berlin Wall. Twenty years on Johnny is the director of an aerial company and with an exciting new performance returns to Berlin, a new vibrant city, to face the ghosts of the past, the present, and Alice. The Last Dance over the Berlin Wall is a story of young love, decadence and tragedy in the walled-in city of West Berlin.

Genres: Fiction

274 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2008

About the author

Lisa studied Russian and Portuguese at the University of London and later took an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where she subsequently worked as academic director for creative writing at the School of Education and has taught there for eighteen years. She also taught a range of courses at the Norwich School of Art & Design. She now lives in Portugal and still teaches short online courses (both fiction and non-fiction) – for the UEA, Oxford and York.

A couple of years ago she set up a small publishing company, Montanha Books. http://www.montanhabooks.com.

She likes to travel and frequently goes to Spain and has recently visited Mozambique and Cuba. An article about about the latter is published in The Literary Traveller.

Reviews

[Pooja Dhiman · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you love historical fiction, you'd love this book.