The Nineteen-Thirties Novel That’s Become a Surprise Hit in the U.K.

The town of Schliersee, about an hour south of Munich in the Bavarian Alps, has long been a favored holiday retreat, both for summertime pursuits on its lake and as a ski resort in winter. There are hiking trails, too, leading up mountains, from which one can see the neighboring territory of Austria, less than ten miles away. When Sally Carson, an English novelist born at the turn of the twentieth century, visited Schliersee in the early nineteen-thirties, she was sensitive to its small-town charms, and drew on them for her characterization of Kranach, the fictional setting for her début novel. The town “basked in the sun,” she wrote. She went on to describe a slope that rose immediately behind a cluster of dwellings, forming a kind of shoulder before the flank of a larger mountain: “There