Toothpull of St Dunstan

by Kevin Davey

The startling memoir of a dentist who for 700 years pulled teeth in the approach to Canterbury, beside its city gate. The hustle and bustle of a road congested with pilgrims, insurgents, migrants, dissenters, quacks, militias and Mods. Facetime with Thomas More, William Courtenay, Darwin, Marx and the Red Dean. Toothpull of St Dunstan is a deep dive of discovery into the margin of a cathedral city, revealing how pain, toothcare and life in the street - along with faith, threats and resistance – change and change again in unexpected ways. Autofiction that will set your teeth on edge! A modern Canterbury tale propelled by dramatic incidents and disturbances which take place outside the gate over seven centuries – from the Peasant’s Revolt to the Blitz, from plagues and protests against the Corn Laws to rowdy mods on scooters in the sixties – packed with striking episodes drawing on the real and probable and at times the outlandish. After reading Toothpull, the last few yards of the ancient Pilgrim’s Way will never look the same again. Neither will your dentist. Nor will tired mainstream history fiction – its time is up.

240 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2025

About the author

Kevin Davey was born in Shelley, Suffolk, and now lives in Whitstable. He went to the University of Kent, Canterbury in 1976 to study Sociology and English, staying on to teach there and write an MPhil dissertation on the work of Raymond Williams. He worked in further education in London in the 1980s and 1990s and was chair of the Socialist Society (1986-88) and chair of the Socialist Conferences in Chesterfield (1987-88). He went on to work for Charter 88 and helped to create the online publishing network Open Democracy. Davey was a regular contributor to Tribune and New Statesman & Society in the 1980s and 1990s, and was editor of the radical monthly New Times from 1999 to 2000.His book English Imaginaries: Anglo-British Approaches to Modernity, an investigation into changing forms of Englishness in the twentieth century, was published by Lawrence and Wishart in 2000. Playing Possum (2017) is his first novel.