Published years before WW2, Sally Carson's prescient novel captures the dawn of Nazi tyranny in a small German town – and remains relevant today.

Eighty years after VE Day, enthusiasm for the World War Two novel remains undimmed.

Demand for tales of wartime Europe, always healthy, has swelled notably since the publication of Anthony Doerr's lyrical All the Light We Cannot See, awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 and subsequently adapted into a Netflix series. Love stories, battle stories, codebreaker stories, resistance stories, concentration camp stories – all have landed on bestseller lists around the world.

And while many novelists in this sub-genre have drawn skillfully on documents, letters and eye-witness accounts eight decades old, the world is unlikely ever again, at this far remove, to see a new work of fiction based on personal experience of that era. Which is one reason Crooked Cross, republished this spring by Persephone Books, is such an extraordinary read. The author, Sylvia "Sally" Carson, a young Englishwoman, was inspired by visits to friends in Bavaria in the early 1930s to write a novel about the dawn of Nazi tyranny in a small German town.

The celebrated US novelist EL Doctorow, author of Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and other works of fiction set in the past, once said: "The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist can tell you what it felt like." And Carson's achievement is to bring to vivid life the fictional Kluger family, residing near the mountains south of Munich who over the course of six months – Christmas Eve 1932 to Midsummer Night 1933 – see their lives shattered.

Carson wrote Crooked Cross – the title refers to the swastika symbol adopted by the Nazis – at speed. It was published in 1934, a year after the events she recounts. Reviews were laudatory, and Carson turned her novel into a play that premiered at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1935, transferring to London's West End two years later. Carson proved remarkably prescient about the horrors to come, and yet after her premature death, in 1941 from breast cancer, her novel sank into obscurity. Persephone's decision to reissue it now is a wise and welcome one.

The action opens when Hans and Rosa Kluger, and their three adult children – daughter Lexa, and sons Helmy and Erich – gather for the Christmas holiday. Life is hard in Depression-era Germany. Herr Kluger's salary at the Post Office has been cut, eldest son Helmy is out of work, and Erich's seasonal job as a ski instructor requires humiliating catering to the whims of rich women. But Christmas is "a time for the knitting together of personal happiness, and of completing the magic circle of their family," Carson writes. Lexa's handsome and successful fiancé, the young surgeon Moritz Weissman, is included in all the celebrations.

When Helmy and Lexa take charge of decorating the tree – the two siblings have always been close – the festive setting is described precisely, with a passing reference to "Helmy's picture of Hitler" that........

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