Except for the dystopian fantasy from the Habsburg monarchy before the first Great War, all books that I presented at this time of summer three years ago dealt with World War II and with some of its effects on later generations respectively. I started the month’s tour on The Train by Vera Panova, a forgotten Stalinist classic about people working on a hospital train behind the front lines of Eastern Europe. After a nightmarish detour to The Other Side with Austrian writer and graphic artist Alfred Kubin that evoked a walled-up “Dream Kingdom” somewhere in the mountains of Central Asia in the 1960s, I returned to war-time Soviet Union and accompanied The Conductor by Sarah Quigley during the siege of Leningrad. And finally I joined The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson who is the son of Jewish immigrants in Manchester and relives his adolescence as a gifted table tennis player.