When sixteen-year-old Peter Hithersay discovers that his\nfather is not the affable Englishman married to his mother, but an\nEast German political dissident with whom she had a brief affair in\nthe 1960s, he abandons Winchester for Leipzig in search of his\npast. There he encounters a lovely young woman who is beginning to\nquestion the way her society is governed, and Peter falls\nimmediately in love with her. But their romance ends quickly and\nbadly when his scheme to smuggle her out of the country goes awry,\nand he returns to England, only to spend the next nineteen years in\na desultory career and a series of perfunctory affairs.
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\nWhen the two Germanies are reunited, Peter goes back to look for\nthe woman he has never stopped loving. But the only clues he has\nare the nickname he gave her, Snowleg, and the relentless archives\nof the state that drove them apart.
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\nNicholas Shakespeare is on his home ground in this beautifully\nwritten, informed, sensitive story about the unassailable dictates\nof love and politics.
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