Pale shadows is a story of romantic love, lust, intrigue, adventure, tragedy, triumph and spiritual search. It opens in Cold War Germany where unhappily married, thirty-eight-year-old, Paul Gregory, an ex-World War II junior British army officer, who is a successful but disillusioned novelist, and amateur race driver, has a romantic encounter in West Berlin, which dramatically changes the course of his life and that of a number of other people close to him.
Set in the “swinging ’sixties” the action shifts through an alpine climb involving Paul, his ex-mistress, the beautiful and wealthy Barbara Schulz, and his Munich based ex-World War II Wehrmacht officer friend, Sepp Heinrich, after which it moves variously back to Berlin, Paul’s British home in Kent, and the south of France where it reaches its climax. ( )