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Virago has acquired rights to publish a German classic novel, The Seventh Cross, by Anna Seghers.
The book is described as "an important novel that documents the insidious rise of a fascist regime – the seething paranoia, the sudden arrests, the silence and fear". Its plot begins with the escape of seven political prisoners from a concentration camp and the commandant's vow to capture the fugitives within a week. Six men are apprehended and brutally made an example of - but one man, George Heisler, evades capture.
Donna Coonan, editorial director of Virago Modern Classics, who acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Inka Ihmels at Aufbau Verlag, said the book was "an astonishing novel" that has the potential to reach as wide an audience as Alone in Berlin or Suite Francaise.
"Seghers’s aim was to write a book ‘that makes it possible to get to know the many layers of fascist Germany though the fortunes of a single man’, and the result is both a gripping escape story and a powerful novel of resistance," she said. "First published in 1942, The Seventh Cross was an international bestseller that was made into an MGM film starring Spencer Tracy in 1944, but it hasn’t been in print in the UK since its first edition, which was heavily abridged. This new translation will be the first to present Seghers’s masterpiece in full."
The manuscript for the book only narrowly survived, according to Virago. Its author, a Jew and a Communist, was blacklisted in Germany, so she fled for France and wrote The Seventh Cross while living in exile. There were four copies of the manuscript: one was lost by a friend who was also fleeing the Nazis; one was destroyed in an air raid; one was found by the Gestapo; the last she sent to her publisher in America just as she was leaving German-occupied France.
Virago will publish The Seventh Cross in hardback in June.