Book description
A young Englishman visits Cold War Leipzig with a group of students
and 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.
