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.