When sixteen-year-old 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 1960s, he travels, in search of his past, to Leipzig. There he falls in love with a beautiful young woman who is beginning to question the way her society is governed. But their romance ends quickly and badly when his scheme to smuggle her out of the country goes awry and he is forced to return to England. When the two Germanies are reunited nineteen years later, Peter goes back to look for the woman he has never stopped loving. But his only clues are the nickname he gave her, Snowleg, and the archives of the state that drove them apart. In Snowleg, Nicholas Shakespeare explores to devastating effect the unassailable dictates of love and politics.