• Veria Central Public Library, Greece
  
  
  

A young Englishman visits Cold War Leipzig with a group of students and, during his brief excursion behind the Iron Curtain, 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 reunited, he decides to go back and look for her. But who was she, how will his actions have affected her, and how will he 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, born in 1957, is the author of three previous novels - The Vision of Elena Silves, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, The High Flyer, and The Dancer Upstairs, which was the American Libraries Association's Best Novel of 1997 and a biography, Bruce Chatwin, published in 1999.