Crooked Cross

At its heart a love story, Crooked Cross is also an extraordinarily prescient account of the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany seen through the eyes of the fictional Kluger family. The only daughter, Lexa Kluger, is engaged to be married to Moritz Weissmann, a young doctor with a bright future ahead of him – or so it seems on Christmas Eve 1932… Reprinted to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII, Crooked Cross is one of the best accounts we’ve read of why young men in particular who feel disaffected, lost or ignored sometimes turn towards authoritarian governments.

"‘Do you want another war, Helmy?’ asked Frau Kluger quietly, keeping her eyes on the bread she was cutting.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered miserably. ‘I don’t know what I want. I want something – we all want something – we all want to be somebody, want to have something – make something.’

‘You mean you all want to break something,’ broke in Lexa sharply. ‘And when you’ve broken everything you can touch – what d’you think you’ll do then?’"

Published to much critical acclaim in 1934 (“gripping and moving” - Daily Mirror, “A book everyone should read – and remember” - Coventry Herald). Sally Carson followed up Crooked Cross with two sequels and a play, but in 1938 she married, had three babies in 3 years, and tragically died of breast cancer at the age of just thirty-nine. She was then all but forgotten for decades, as was Crooked Cross (Persephone Books owns almost the only original copy in existence outside of the legal deposit libraries) – until now.  

An early reader of our new edition, novelist Rachel Joyce, wrote to us, 'Crooked Cross is an electrifying masterpiece. It is also my favourite kind of book – unputdownable, beautifully intricate, ambitious and unsentimental. Like the very best, it stays with you long after the last page. I won’t forget it.’ We agree. 

Endpapers

The endpapers for Crooked Cross are taken from a curtain material – machine cord embroidery on a linen background – manufactured in Germany in 1930 and sold at the Hohenzollern-Kunstgewerbehaus Friedmann & Weber GmbH in Berlin (which was forced to close in 1936) © Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz/May Voigt. 

Picture Caption

Sally Carson, who taught dance as well as being a writer, in Switzerland in the 1920s.