The Prisoner

The Prisoner is the much-anticipated sequel to Persephone Books’s recent best-seller, Crooked Cross by Sally Carson. The novel opens in August 1933, just a few weeks afterCrooked Cross ended. Set mostly in Munich, it describes the lives of the Kluger family as Nazism strengthens its grip on Germany: we watch as Erich’s commitment to the Party grows, while Helmy’s struggles to accept its strictures threatens to be the family’s undoing. This is a most unusual and unforgettable novel: an English woman, and therefore an outsider, writing about two perfectly ordinary German men who become, or are meant to become, implacable Nazis – as early as 1933. As one contemporary review put it,’Sally Carson, who gave us such a vivid picture of Germany inside with her clever book Crooked Cross, has given her readers another wonderful story showing the terrible crisis through which the German nation is passing today in spite of the mad enthusiasm so often displayed… Although presented as a story, the reader cannot get away from the feeling that all the time he is reading the true drama of a great nation which appears to have made a god of its present leader.’

Described on its initial publication as ‘a novel of unusual power and poignant interest’, ‘a deeply moving story’ and ‘the finest novel on modern Germany’, reading The Prisoner today one can’t help but wonder whether, if Sally Carson’s book had had a wider audience at the time, it might have changed the course of history. But alas, it was ‘only’ a woman’s novel.

Written by Sally Carson whilst she was holidaying in a Bavarian resort town in the summer of 1935 and then first published in the spring of 1936, The Prisoner offers a rare contemporaneous account, and from a female perspective, of what it really felt like to live through this terrible period in history.