Alas, I have just a moment to raise my head and ask how I have ever managed to overlook the British novelist Nicholas Shakespeare? Political history and a love story do equal time in Snowleg, his latest novel, about a British medical student in West Germany who falls in love with a young East German woman in the last decade of the cold war. Upon scanning the novel briefly, I noticed from the blurb on the back cover that Shakespeare's novel, The Dancer Upstairs (published in the U.S. in 1997), was chosen as the best novel of 1997 by the American Library Association. It was also made into a movie directed by John Malkovich. Does anyone remember it?