The middle month of my Winter Books Special of three years ago took me first to Long Island in the USA with The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck, the last and a bit neglected novel of the 1962 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. From there I embarked on a round-trip of Europe. My first stop was in a small English village that served as scene for the forgotten Welsh classic Winter Sonata by Dorothy Edwards. Then I visited a married couple in modern-day Finland who got carried away in The Winter War by Philip Teir. In a small Austrian town of the early 1990s I found the protagonist of Winter Quarters by Evelyn Grill at the mercy of a violent husband. And eventually I returned to the British Isles, more precisely to the borderlands and Scotland, in the mid-eighteenth century to meet Midwinter by John Buchan.