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 the next 19 years pretending to himself that he is not in love until one day, with Germany now united, 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 to her - Snowleg.

Nicholas Shakespeare's first novel since The Dancer Upstairs 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 regime where every move is not only recorded, but where a person's scent may be secretly bottled, labeled and stored away until such time as she needs to be traced.