Snowleg - Hardcover

Shakespeare, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 015101146X ISBN 13: 9780151011469

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004

Synopsis

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 abandons Winchester for Leipzig in search of his past. There he encounters a lovely young woman who is beginning to question the way her society is governed, and Peter falls immediately in love with her. But their romance ends quickly and badly when his scheme to smuggle her out of the country goes awry, and he returns to England, only to spend the next nineteen years in a desultory career and a series of perfunctory affairs.

When the two Germanies are reunited, Peter goes back to look for the woman he has never stopped loving. But the only clues he has are the nickname he gave her, Snowleg, and the relentless archives of the state that drove them apart.

Nicholas Shakespeare is on his home ground in this beautifully written, informed, sensitive story about the unassailable dictates of love and politics.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

From the award-winning writer Nicholas Shakespeare, comes Snowleg,a beautiful new novel about one man ?s longing for a love he had the chance to grasp but failed to take.

A young Englishman goes to Cold War Leipzig for a weekend with a group of student actors and, during his brief visit beyond the Iron Curtain, falls for an East German girl who is just beginning to be aware of the horrendous way her country is governed. Her misery touches him, her love excites him, but he is too frightened to help. He spends 19 years suppressing the strength of his feelings for the girl he knew only by her nickname ?Snowleg ? ? until one day, with Germany by now united, he decides to go back and look for her. But who is she now, how will his having once abandoned her have affected her life, and how will he find her? Snowleg is the story of more than one sundered love, of both broken dreams and damaged families.

About the Author:

Nicholas Shakespeare is the author of The Dancer Upstairs, selected by the American Libraries Association as the best novel of 1997, and an acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin. Named one of Granta magazine's "Best Young British Novelists" in 1993, Shakespeare lives in Wiltshire, England.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 015101146X
• ISBN 13: 9780151011469
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 386