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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 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.… (more)
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Outside of the main plot, things happen – in fact this is a long, very densely packed book, but the plot was what kept me reading through the middle sections where little seemed to be achieved towards the story’s aims. I am sure the writing was rich in metaphor, and a second reading might well bring this to the fore. What I did find as the book progressed was reason after reason not to like Peter very much – his treatment of his family back home, his relationships with women in general...and yet I did want him to succeed in his quest.
After a long period of zero progress, Peter finally makes a breakthrough and a rapid rifle-fire of revelation after revelation threatened to leave me confused. But there is something about this novel that is compelling – I suspect a year after reading it I will struggle to recall many plot details but when you are in the moment it demands your attention. Reaching the end I was unsure whether I was in awe of the author’s edge of the seat writing, or cross with him for putting me through the wringer.