The Crooked Cross by Sally Carson: A Rediscovered Lost Masterpiece

The Crooked Cross by Sally Carson: A Rediscovered Lost Masterpiece

Francesca Beauman • Bath

Francesca Beauman will talk about the Crooked Cross by Sally Carson, a lost masterpiece from the 1930s that quickly became a word-of-mouth, best-seller when it was reprinted by Persephone Books last year. The novel charts the rise of the Nazis between December 1932 and August 1933 in a small town in Bavaria, as seen through the eyes of one ordinary family. It is extraordinarily prescient, anticipating all the horrors they were about to inflict on the world. The heroine of the novel, Lexa, watches her brothers being seduced by National Socialism, as she observes her Catholic fiancé losing his job because of his Jewish surname. The Crooked Cross was originally published in 1934 to universal acclaim; but with the outbreak of war, and Carson’s death in 1941, the book went out of print. Francesca will reveal the fascinating story behind this prophetic novel and the background to Persephone Books’s decision to republish it.

Francesca Beauman is the Managing Director of Persephone Books, an independent publisher based in Bath that was founded in 1999. They specialise in reprints of neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers and mostly dating from the mid-twentieth century. Persephone Books’s titles are stocked by leading book stores all over the world. Their own shop in Bath was recently named by The Observer as one of the ‘UK’s 50 most fabulous shops’.