In Leipzig, a young Englishman falls for an East German woman beginning to understand the shape of the state around her.

All around its surveillance, its quiet coercions, its narrowing rooms, start to press in. He sees enough to know she needs help, but not enough bravery to offer it. Instead, he leaves — and spends the next nineteen years persuading himself that leaving was not a form of betrayal.

After German reunification, now older and respectably settled, he returns to find her. But history does not wait in place for the guilty to come back and arrange it neatly. All he has is a nickname — Snowleg — and the knowledge that his absence may have mattered more than he let himself believe. A restrained, morally tangled novel about love, cowardice, memory, and the political weather that enters private life whether invited or not.

2004 Harvill Press paperback, first edition. Good condition with light cover wear.