Snowleg

Description

A young Englishman visits Cold War Leipzig with a group of students and, during his brief excursion behind the Iron Curtain, falls for an East German girl who is only just beginning to wake up to the way her society is governed. Her situation touches him, but he is too frightened to help. He spends decades convincing himself that he is not in love until one day, with Germany now reunited, he decides to go back and look for her. But who was she, how will his actions have affected her, and how will her find her? All he knows of her identity is the nickname he gave her - Snowleg. Snowleg is a powerful love story that explores the close, fraught relationship between England and Germany, between a man who grows up believing himself to be a chivalrous English public schoolboy and a woman who tries to live loyally under a repressive regime.

Nicholas Shakespeare was born in 1957. The son of a diplomat, much of his youth was spent in the Far East and South America. His novels have been translated into twenty languages. They include The Vision of Elena Silves, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, Snowleg and The Dancer Upstairs, which was chosen by the American Libraries Association in 1997 as the year's best novel, and in 2001 was made into a film of the same name by John Malkovich. His most recent novel is Secrets of the Sea. He is married with two small boys and currently lives in Oxford.

This novel is one of the finest attempts in English to convey something of two very strange places which no longer appear on the map of Europe... Shakespeare has told a very skilful story * Evening Standard * Offers more than high romance: it is a portrait, and a good one, of the East Germany of the Stasi, with its bleakly beautiful landscapes, its casual betrayals, and its subtle capacity to dehumanise * Daily Telegraph * His finest book yet. Beautifully written, rich in character, it displays all the courage for which its hero so desperately wants to be recognised * Economist * A heart-warming tale of rich, enabling coincidence and conquering love; love without frontiers * Guardian * Elegant metaphors, striking insights, eidetic settings and sensitive renditions of character - Shakespeare's writing is of a high order. Impressive * Time Out *