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Overview
When 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 sixties, Peter abandons Winchester for Leipzig in search of his past. There he encounters a beautiful young woman who is beginning to question the way her society is governed, and Peter falls in love. Their romance ends when his scheme to smuggle her out of the country goes awry. 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. Shakespeare is on his home ground in this beautifully written, informed, sensitive story about the unassailable dictates of love and politics.Editorials
Andrew nagorski
… Shakespeare has constructed a moving story that speaks volumes about an era and a political system that is rapidly slipping into the recesses of our memory. As one minor British character points out, East Germany -- now thankfully defunct -- boasted "the vilest regime in the Communist bloc." Vilest of all was the behavior that such regimes routinely induced in their terrified citizens and foreign visitors confronted with unfamiliar moral dilemmas. Most people would prefer to forget how they behaved in those situations, but Shakespeare's Snowleg can't help but remind us of the good, the bad and the shameful.— The Washington Post
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. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
"A richly imagined tale of thwarted romance, between characters whose lives have been warped by East German treachery under Communism"Library Journal
"Elegant, romantic, forceful"Seattle Times
"SNOWLEG is an admirably organic novel, well-seeded with richly idiosyncratic characterizations and finely evoked places"Seattle Times
"SNOWLEG is an admirably organic novel, well-seeded with richly idiosyncratic characterizations and finely evoked places"Washington Post Book World
"Deftly crafted, SNOWLEG speaks volumes about an era and a political system that is rapidly slipping into the recesses of our memory"San Francisco Chronicle
"A volatile cocktail of passion and politics"Booklist
"A beautifully written, utterly compelling story of love and politics"Book Details
Published
August 1, 2004
Publisher
ISIS Large Print Books
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780753120347