Snowleg

Nicholas Shakespeare’s moving drama follows a doctor searching for the girl he abandoned 19 years ago. Who is she now? And how will he ever find her?A young Englishman visits Cold War Leipzig 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 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 riddled with similar displacements and complications: semantic, legal, geographical, psychological... Nicholas Shakespeare is deft as ever at evoking the touch and texture of an alien land... Manic plot devices, literary tics and grammatical sprains not-withstanding, Snowleg is a considerable achievement: a dark, dense account of arrested development and mid-life crisis; a shrewd study of institutionalised paralysis and political psychosis; a humane perspective on the rusting away of the iron curtain. What's curious is that it's also a thoroughly conventional romance novel: a heart-warming tale of rich, enabling coincidence and conquering love; love without frontiers." - Colin Greenlands, The GuardianNicholas William Richmond Shakespeare is a British novelist and biographer. He worked as a journalist for BBC television and then on The Times as assistant arts and literary editor. From 1988 to 1991 he was literary editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph. Since 2000, Shakespeare has been Patron of the Anita Goulden Trust, helping children in the Peruvian city of Piura. The UK-based charity was set up following an article that Shakespeare wrote for the Daily Telegraph magazine, which raised more than £350,000. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 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.