THE CATASTROPHIC EVENT at the heart of this novel takes place in a Leipzig hotel in March 1983. A mysterious German girl known only as Snowleg struggles to enter a private banquet attended by an English medical student named Peter, whom she has met and slept with the night before.

'Sir, this young lady says you invited her to dinner. Is she with you?' enquires a hotel doorman. 'No,' replies the young Englishman.

As he utters this terrible, almost biblical denial, completely at odds with his childhood vision of himself as one of King Arthur's knights, Peter senses he has changed