Snowleg
-
- £4.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The personal and the political clash in this sometimes haunting but often baffling novel about Peter Hithersay, an English teenager, and his one-night encounter with an East German girl, known to him only by her nickname, "Snowleg," in 1983. She begs him to take her back to the West; for reasons he can't quite fathom himself and which will haunt him for the next 20 years he refuses (indeed, he publicly rejects her) and loses his chance at what appears to be love at first sight. Peter may have been re-creating his mother's experience: she had a brief affair with an East German (Peter was the result) and never saw him again, and Peter's trip behind the Iron Curtain is driven by the desire to learn something, anything, about his German father. Later, he essentially gives up England and his affable family, becoming a doctor in West Germany, where he strives (mostly unsuccessfully) to build meaningful relationships of his own. The strongest narrative thread, Peter's search for Snowleg, is compelling enough, but accounts for a small fraction of the plot. Shakespeare (The Dancer Upstairs) deftly captures both the paranoia and the material and cultural poverty of East Germany as well as Peter's existential struggle to find his place in the world, but the haphazard story line fails to compel.
