The Dancing Face is a blistering, original thriller that examines the powerful link between identity, sacrifice, and possession, as a Black university professor plans a burglary to “liberate” an African sculpture from a London museum.
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LitStackers! Line up for this one. In presale now, Melville House will release The Dancing Face by Mike Phillips on August 12, 2025. Early word suggests an immersive and exciting novel. While details remain scarce, the publisher’s description and the cover art hint at a reading experience that will linger long after you turn the last page. Here’s the scoop and early praise on this next must-read. Dip into the book fund for this one!
In This Spotlight On The Dancing Face
About The Dancing Face
In London, University lecturer Gus knows that stealing the priceless Benin mask, the Dancing Face, from a museum at the heart of the British establishment will gain an avalanche of attention. Which is exactly what he wants.
But such a risky theft will also inevitably capture the attention of characters with more money, more power, and fewer morals.
Naively entangling his loved ones in his increasingly dangerous pursuit of righteous reparation, is Gus prepared for what it will cost him?
Perfect for fans of heist thrillers. Bernadine Evaristo is a champion of this novel, having included it in a series of novels she has curated for Penguin Classics in the UK. Other Phillips fans include Walter Mosley, Gary Phillips (no relationship), and James Elroy.
Themes of Reparations and Repatriation. For fans of Smoke Kings, this is a seriously thoughtful and page-turning heist thriller that confronts one of the great issues of our times: reparations for the crimes of colonialism and Empire
A master of British crime fiction returns to America. Mike Phillips is a pioneering figure in Black British crime fiction, having emerged with his Sam Dean thriller series in the late 1980s. A prominent public intellectual in Britain, this is the first novel of his to be published in the U.S. this century. His first novel Blood Rites is in development as a BBC TV series.
Praise for The Dancing Face
“Any timeline of black British literary history worth its salt needs to include the oeuvre of Phillips, and this novel [The Dancing Face] exemplifies the best of his vigorous writing.”—Bernardine Evaristo
“The Dancing Face has the page-turning quality of all good crime novels . . . The characters in The Dancing Face, as well as the relationships that link them, are extremely well fleshed-out . . . The ability to expose the many different aspects of political issues in a digestible way is one of the beauties of fiction, and Phillips makes use of it masterfully in The Dancing Face.―Bad Form
[The Dancing Face] is brutal, deep, cunning and unbearably beautiful”―The Independent
About Mike Phillips, Author of The Dancing Face
Writer Mike Phillips was born in Georgetown, Guyana. He came to Britain as a child and grew up in London. He was educated at the University of London and the University of Essex, and gained a Postgraduate Certificate of Education at Goldsmiths College, London.
He worked for the BBC as a journalist and broadcaster between 1972 and 1983 on television programmes including The Late Show and Omnibus, before becoming a lecturer in media studies at the University of Westminster.
He is best known for his crime fiction, including four novels featuring black journalist Sam Dean: Blood Rights (1989), which was adapted for BBC television, The Late Candidate (1990), winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction, Point of Darkness (1994) and An Image to Die For (1995). The Dancing Face (1997) is a thriller centred on a priceless Benin mask. His most recent novel, A Shadow of Myself (2000), is a thriller about a black documentary filmmaker working in Prague and a man who claims to be his brother. He is currently working on a sequel.
Mike Phillips co-wrote Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1998) to accompany a BBC television series telling the story of the Caribbean migrant workers who settled in post-war Britain. His book, London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain (2001), is a series of interlinked essays and stories, a portrait of the city seen from locations as diverse as New York and Nairobi, London and Lodz, Washington and Warsaw.
You can connect with Mike Phillips on Wikipedia.
Source: Publisher, Amazon
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 9781685891718
Pub Date: Aug 12, 2025
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