Crooked Cross

by Sally Carson

Persephone book no:

151 152

Order This Book

Napkin Selection The Far Cry
A Well Full of Leaves

£15.00

Pre-order

Quantity

Please note that although you may receive an email saying the book has shipped, it will not reach you until around Thursday April 17th 2025, which is publication date.

380pp
ISBN 9781910263426
PREFACE BY LAURA FREEMAN

Crooked Cross is at its heart a love story, but it 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 World War Two, Crooked Cross is one of the best accounts we’ve read of why some young men who feel disaffected, lost or ignored 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?’"

Crooked Cross was published to critical acclaim in 1934 (“Gripping and moving” - Daily Mirror, “A book everyone should read – and remember” - Coventry Herald) and Sally Carson followed it up with two sequels (The Prisoner and A Traveller Came By) and a play (a dramatised version of Crooked Cross). 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 – until now.

Endpapers

The endpapers for Crooked Cross are taken from a curtain material – machine cord embroidery on a linen background – that's just the sort of thing Frau Kluger might have had hanging in her kitchen. It was 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

Read What Readers Say

Rachel Joyce (author of 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry')

'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.

Joanna Quinn (author of 'The Whalebone Theatre')

This is 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... The central character, Lexa, [is] the power embodiment of the loneliness of moral courage - and this heartrending story carries a warning that feels horribly relevant today... extremely recommended.

Categories: Family History Love Story Men (books about) Overseas Politics Race WWII