When Crooked Cross was published in 1934 the Daily Mirror thought it ‘gripping and moving’, the Observer called it ‘a very good novel’, the Times Literary Supplement congratulated Sally Carson on ‘the delicacy of the love story which she has placed in this grim setting’ and the Coventry Herald thought it ‘a book everyone should read – and remember’. A year later it was turned into a West End play and then she wrote two sequels, The Prisoner (1936) and A Traveller Came By (1938). But with the outbreak of war, and Sally Carson’s death in 1941, her work was forgotten – until now.