Book clubs in Dunbar

What I love about this book is its epic scale, telling the story of the Winter family in Germany from the turn of 20th Century, up until 1945. Harold Winter is a businessman with two sons, each of whom becomes a lawyer. One becomes part of the Nazi “machine”, dreaming up legal justification for their actions, whilst the other emigrates to their mother’s American homeland, becomes vigorously opposed to Nazi ideology, and returns to Germany as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. The book is something of a prequel to Deighton’s “Game, Set and Match” trilogy, which eventually became part of a nine novel trilogy of trilogies! Several characters (or their forebears) from these novels appear in Winter, which gives the reader much broader historical context. For me Winter, and its successor novels, provides a fascinating historical perspective of life in Berlin in the first half of the 20th Century, its influence on the conduct of the Cold War, and an interesting commentary on people from working class backgrounds workung alongside their Oxbridge educated counterparts in the British Secret Service, a theme that runs through other Deighton books like The Ipcress File.

Slightly futuristic but not too silly, and a cracking plot

It is well written by a Scottish journalist/ book editor who, in her spare moments, created a wedding business empire - from her spare bedroom. The period was one of enormous change from 1971 to 2012 and the thousands of weddings during that period reflected Scottish life after joining Europe. Mainly the books are funny and character-filled- good reads!