Peter Hithersay is miserable. Despite an expensive education at an English public school and a successful career as a doctor, his life is hollow. Two parallel events, separated by over twenty years have brought him to this wretched state.

The first, was the revelation on his sixteenth birthday that his real father was not Rodney - the man he had called Dad for 16 years - but was actually an escaped political prisoner in East Germany with whom his mother had had a one night affair. The second event was a brief affair that Peter himself had with an East German woman (whom he nicknames Snowleg) whilst on a short trip from West to East Germany during his student days. Despite her burgeoning realisation of her predicament stuck on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, Peter is unable to help her, and this refusal - which he puts down to cowardice on his own part - leaves him feeling that he has betrayed the only woman he ever really loved. It is not until twenty years later that he is able to even begin to piece together the shards of his life, and make amends for his youthful betrayal.

This is a frustrating novel. Nicholas Shakespeare touches on a range of themes that provide fertile ground for a story: Peter’s identity crisis and sense of cultural dislocation as his resolutely English upbringing clashes with the revelation about his German ancestry, the tumultuous events of Germany’s reunification, and the tale of love that exists across generational, geographical and political divides. Yet despite all of this, the book fails to ever really surprise or provoke the reader. This is largely due to the fact that the book is extremely formulaic. The parallel between the two events - of Peter’s own conception as a result of a random and brief affair and his own affair with Snowleg - is neat, but it means that the ending becomes painfully obvious very early on. This, coupled with a prose style that is episodic and laconic means that by the end you find yourself willing the novel to get on with it and reach its all too obvious conclusion.

Shakespeare also has a penchant for truly odd similes. One character is described as ‘sleeping like a marmot’, another as having eyes ‘brown, like a Vietnamese doll’s’ and, most bizarre of all, he describes ‘the barrel of each gun mimicking their stare like the dark unclosing eyeball of a fish.’ It is hard to know what precisely he is trying to achieve with such imagery, it is idiosyncratic to no purpose, and so the language simply ends up feeling self-conscious and jarring. Nothing about the book is terrible, but structure of the story is so utterly conventional that it becomes impossible for Shakespeare to develop his themes in any truly compelling manner.