One a scholar and one a romantic, their lives diverge, leading one into the inner mechanisms of the Nazi Party and one into exile in America, the birthplace of their mother.

From their sheltered childhood through their violent coming of age in the Great War, from the chaos of 1920s Berlin to the spreading power of Hitler they are wrenched apart by conflicting ideals and ambitions.

Their story is further complicated by their father's long standing affair with a Hungarian woman, eventually revealed to be Jewish; their love for him is overshadowed by their loathing of his behaviour.

A further contrast is supplied through the use of Brian's social displacement as a working class man operating in the rarified atmosphere of the world of pre-war and wartime espionage.

Winter received favourable reviews, with critics describing it as "a masterful portrayal of the German Zeitgeist of almost half a century"[5] and that it "makes comprehensible the awful appeal of Nazism to people of different persuasions".