Crooked Cross - by Sally Carson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A thrilling, long-lost British novel--never before published in the U.S.--that warned of Hitler's rise through the story of an ordinary German family during six fateful months in 1933; it has been hailed as "a surprise breakout success" and "a word-of-mouth jaw-dropper" in the UK.

The Klugers are a tight-knit family living in a picturesque mountain village in Bavaria. As 1932 draws to a close, Herr Kluger is dismayed by the growing popularity of the Nazi Party but aware of its leader's charisma: he warns his two sons, "Don't you know that to hear that chap speak is to believe everything he says for twenty-four hours?" To his sons, however, the Party offers not only employment prospects but also meaning and purpose--a powerful draw for a generation whose life chances had been decimated by Germany's defeat in the Great War. Helmy, the sensitive elder brother, joins the Party with some reluctance, while Erich becomes a true believer.

Their beloved sister, Lexa, meanwhile, finds her engagement to her sweetheart under threat. Moritz Weissman, though a Catholic, is half-Jewish, and when it becomes clear he is at risk, Lexa's family urges her to break things off. She continues to see Moritz secretly, but as Hitler becomes chancellor, laws restricting Jews are passed, Dachau is opened, and armed thugs roam the streets rounding up "enemies of the state," history closes in on the young lovers.

Crooked Cross, written while Sally Carson was visiting Germany in the early 1930s and witnessing the historic events it depicts, is insightful, moving, and shockingly prescient.

Review Quotes

"A surprise breakout success in the UK. . . . For modern-day readers, the novel is more than merely a historical curiosity; rather, as the critic Laura Freeman writes, 'It is a book that asks what you would do . . . if the freedoms you believe inviolable were destroyed.'" --The New Yorker

"A word-of-mouth jaw-dropper. . . . Carson shows us how extremism, when it takes hold, provides young men with purpose, work, a narrative, hope. It also provides them with a set of people--left-wingers and Jews--to hate, to blame, to punish. . . . The resonances with today are impossible to overlook. Would that we all had Carson's insight and her moral clarity." --The Guardian

"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." --The Times (London)

"An electrifying masterpiece. It is also my favourite kind of book--unputdownable, beautifully intricate, ambitious and unsentimental." --Rachel Joyce

About the Author

SALLY CARSON was born in 1902 in Surrey, England, and brought up and educated in Dorset. For several years she served as a publisher's reader, taught dance, and worked on an unpublished novel. During this time, she often went to stay in Bavaria with friends; it was first in Germany and then back in England that she wrote her trilogy of novels, Crooked Cross (1934), The Prisoner (1936), and A Traveller Came By (1938). Crooked Cross was performed as a play in Birmingham in 1935 and later in London. In 1938 she married Eric Humphries and gave birth to three children before dying of breast cancer in June of 1941.