Synopses & Reviews
When sixteen-year-old Peter Hithersay discovers that his father is not the affable Englishman married to his mother but an East German political dissident with whom she had a brief affair in the 1960s, he travels, in search of his past, to Leipzig. There he falls in love with a beautiful young woman who is beginning to question the way her society is governed. But their romance ends quickly and badly when his scheme to smuggle her out of the country goes awry and he is forced to return to England.
When the two Germanies are reunited nineteen years later, Peter goes back to look for the woman he has never stopped loving. But his only clues are the nickname he gave her, Snowleg, and the archives of the state that drove them apart.
In Snowleg, Nicholas Shakespeare explores to devastating effect the unassailable dictates of love and politics.
Review
"Shakespeare has constructed a moving story that speaks volumes about an era and a political system that is rapidly slipping into the recesses of our memory." Washington Post
Review
"Snowleg is an admirably organic novel....[A] delicious mystery, not only in genre but also in the ways that people separated by personal or public barriers carry on after life-altering schisms." Seattle Times
Review
"The novel moves at a cool, deliberate pace...as Peter's life methodically unspools in a quest for identity and redemption." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Like Michael Ondaajte in The English Patient and Shirley Hazzard in The Great Fire, Shakespeare here weds a formal, detached prose style to a deeply romantic theme; the result is a powerful, ethereal love story set against the twisted politics of East Germany under communism....A beautifully written, utterly compelling story of love and politics." Booklist
Review
"Snowleg is his finest book yet. Beautifully written, rich in character, it displays all the courage for which its hero so desperately wants to be recognized." Economist
Review
"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 skillful story." Evening Standard
Synopsis
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 reunited, he decides to go back and look for her. But who was she, how will his actions have affected her, and how will he 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.
About the Author
NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE is the author of The Dancer Upstairs and an acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin. He lives in Wiltshire, England.
CITATION: "Deftly crafted, SNOWLEG speaks volumes about an era and a political system that is rapidly slipping into the recesses of our memory"(Washington Post Book World)
CITATION: "A volatile cocktail of passion and politics"(San Francisco Chronicle, Nov 7 2004 )
CITATION: "A beautifully written, utterly compelling story of love and politics"(Booklist, Sep 1 2004 )
CITATION: "A richly imagined tale of thwarted romance, between characters whose lives have been warped by East German treachery under Communism"(Kirkus Reviews, Aug 1 2004 )
CITATION: "Elegant, romantic, forceful"(Library Journal, Aug 1 2004 )
CITATION: "SNOWLEG is an admirably organic novel, well-seeded with richly idiosyncratic characterizations and finely evoked places"(Seattle Times, Dec 5 2004 )