Crooked Cross (Classic edition)

A word-of-mouth jaw-dropper, passed from hand to hand… Reading this novel, armed with the hindsight that Carson herself lacked, is a remarkable experience, at times painful… What is so impressive about Carson is, despite the fact she had no idea where Hitlerism would end, the novel has an unshakeable moral core.

Sally Carson’s prescient novel offers an unflinching look at the early days of Nazism, resonating with today’s fears of lost boys, strong men and old hatreds... A remarkable novel: chilling, compelling, contained... a propulsive read....

Eighty years after VE Day, enthusiasm for the World War Two novel remains undimmed... And while many novelists in this sub-genre have drawn skillfully on documents, letters and eye-witness accounts eight decades old, the world is unlikely ever again, at this far remove, to see a new work of fiction based on personal experience of that era. Which is one reason 'Crooked Cross', republished this spring by Persephone Books, is such an extraordinary read... Persephone's decision to reissue it now is a wise and welcome one.... Some readers will be quick to draw modern parallels, especially to the rise of right-wing populism around the world, and the propensity for young men to be seduced by extremist movements, when they feel – as millions did in 1930s Germany – purposeless, disaffected or lost. But the real question that 'Crooked Cross' raises is personal. What would you do if the people you love begin to espouse ideas you hate? Now that Carson's indelible portrait of the tragic Kluger family has resurfaced, it warrants a permanent place in the growing canon of World War Two literature.

'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, and leaves you with the feeling that a door has been opened that you had only dimly seen before. It’s a brilliant account of a young woman’s political and emotional awakening in Nazi Germany - the realisation that it it is no longer acceptable or possible for her to exist apart from the society and belief system in which she lives. That she must either subscribe to it or fight it. But also, within the bigger context of her family and friends, it’s brilliant (and somehow even forgiving) of how different people - both men and women - became seduced by the Nazi movement, answered by it, in fact, and give up the code of morals which had previously held them. I won’t forget it.

Cautionary, prescient... un-putdownable.

Astonishingly readable, a family saga with a propulsive terrible energy to it and I have raced through it the last two days... I so recommend this book to everyone.

Gripping... utterly vivid.

An astonishing book. It depicts an ordinary Germany family in 1933, revealing how they and their country are sliding towards the horrors of fascism. It's such a compulsive story, it reads like a contemporary novel - but it was written in 1934! It's a rare writer who can look at her present moment and predict its terrible end result, before it has even happened... extremely recommended.

Set in a small village in the Bavarian Alps, Sally Carson’s 'Crooked Cross' presents an eerily familiar portrait of the rise of fascism... With the book’s rediscovery, Carson is restored to her place among other Anglosphere authors who observed from up close the dawning of the Nazi era, including Kay Boyle, the American writer whose novel 'Death of a Man', published in 1936, was set in the Tyrolian Alps, across the Austrian border from Carson’s fictional Kranach, and Christopher Isherwood, whose 'Goodbye to Berlin', published in 1939, depicted the decadent life of the metropolis immediately before Hitler’s ascent… For modern-day readers, the novel is more than merely a historical curiosity; rather, as the critic Laura Freeman writes in her introduction, “It is a book that asks what you would do if the world went crooked, if the people you loved were persecuted, if the freedoms you believe inviolable were destroyed.” One might challenge Freeman only on her use of the conditional tense: that this is already a crooked world is hard to deny...

Plangent, prophetic… The remarkable narrative omniscience shapes the novel’s plot, that of ordinary Germans caught up in a willed catastrophe… 'Crooked Cross', like other once lost novels of this period such as ‘Alone in Berlin’, ‘The Passenger’ and ‘Suite Francaise’, was written in real time. We know the outcome, yet at every point, like Lexa, believe it can somehow be prevented – even as people are abducted off the streets and the country slides towards authoritarianism.

Allow me to join the chorus of praise for Persephone Books, who uncovered a real lost treasure in CROOKED CROSS by Sally Carson. The cross in question is the swastika, because this is a forgotten English writer’s take on the impact of encroaching Nazism on a small Bavarian village. I wouldn’t be the first to point out that there are certain obvious, chilling parallels with Europe and America today.