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Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent
An extraordinary love story of two unlikely figures played out against the backdrop of the Cold War.
Best-selling novelist and art historian Iain Pears enchants readers with the real-life romance between Larissa Salmina, a Russian art curator, and Francis Haskell, a British art historian. His fabulous book brings into sharp focus the strange world of the Soviet Union, and the even stranger world of a certain variety of the English elite. It seeks to show how leaving the Soviet Union was a sacrifice for her and how it was the English man, not the Russian woman, who was set free because of their meeting.
Larissa was born in northern Russia, the daughter of a Soviet army officer from a noble family who survived the siege of Leningrad by eating cats’ tails and being evacuated over the ice. Francis was the grandson of an Iraqi Jew, forever feeling out of place in his adopted country of England. Parallel Lives is the story of how these two star-crossed lovers met, instantly understand each other, and were prepared to risk heartbreak, and in her case, retribution, to be together.
Escaping Leningrad, teenage Larissa lived in the Urals surrounded by Spanish revolutionaries, and after the war rose to become the youngest commissar in the Soviet Union and keeper of Italian drawings at the Hermitage. She took the Russian contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1962 and lost it on the journey. She briefly absconded with her supervisor’s corpse, developed a useful sideline in forgery, and stole (“I didn’t steal it. I liberated it”) a Matisse from the Italian government. Francis was a distinguished art historian, comfortably at home in King’s College Cambridge. But he was lonely, self-doubting, and had all but abandoned hope of falling in love. Larissa swept away all the years of anguish in one meal.
Iain Pears, who was neighbors with Larissa and Francis in Oxford, knew both his principal characters well. In telling Larissa and Francis’s love story, he is also capturing the Europe of a bygone a world of dancers, exiles, and the occasional spy, of artists, aristocrats, and academics. It is a tale of a world we have lost.
Best-selling novelist and art historian Iain Pears enchants readers with the real-life romance between Larissa Salmina, a Russian art curator, and Francis Haskell, a British art historian. His fabulous book brings into sharp focus the strange world of the Soviet Union, and the even stranger world of a certain variety of the English elite. It seeks to show how leaving the Soviet Union was a sacrifice for her and how it was the English man, not the Russian woman, who was set free because of their meeting.
Larissa was born in northern Russia, the daughter of a Soviet army officer from a noble family who survived the siege of Leningrad by eating cats’ tails and being evacuated over the ice. Francis was the grandson of an Iraqi Jew, forever feeling out of place in his adopted country of England. Parallel Lives is the story of how these two star-crossed lovers met, instantly understand each other, and were prepared to risk heartbreak, and in her case, retribution, to be together.
Escaping Leningrad, teenage Larissa lived in the Urals surrounded by Spanish revolutionaries, and after the war rose to become the youngest commissar in the Soviet Union and keeper of Italian drawings at the Hermitage. She took the Russian contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1962 and lost it on the journey. She briefly absconded with her supervisor’s corpse, developed a useful sideline in forgery, and stole (“I didn’t steal it. I liberated it”) a Matisse from the Italian government. Francis was a distinguished art historian, comfortably at home in King’s College Cambridge. But he was lonely, self-doubting, and had all but abandoned hope of falling in love. Larissa swept away all the years of anguish in one meal.
Iain Pears, who was neighbors with Larissa and Francis in Oxford, knew both his principal characters well. In telling Larissa and Francis’s love story, he is also capturing the Europe of a bygone a world of dancers, exiles, and the occasional spy, of artists, aristocrats, and academics. It is a tale of a world we have lost.
286 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 1, 2025
40 people are currently reading
3409 people want to read
About the author
Iain Pears
42 books948 followersIain Pears is an English art historian, novelist and journalist. He was educated at Warwick School, Warwick, Wadham College and Wolfson College, Oxford. Before writing, he worked as a reporter for the BBC, Channel 4 (UK) and ZDF (Germany) and correspondent for Reuters from 1982 to 1990 in Italy, France, UK and US. In 1987 he became a Getty Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Yale University. His well-known novel series features Jonathan Argyll, art historian, though international fame first arrived with his best selling book An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998), which was translated into several languages. Pears currently lives with his wife and children in Oxford.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
May 13, 2025
At its core, the book recounts how Larissa, a Soviet art historian from Leningrad, and Francis, an English art historian from Cambridge, met in Venice in 1962 and fell in love against the backdrop of espionage-era paranoia and bureaucratic suspicion. Their paths, detailed in parallel chapters, are nothing short of extraordinary.
Larissa’s life reads like a Tolstoyan epic: the daughter of a noble Soviet officer, she survived the Siege of Leningrad, lost a Matisse (and later "liberated" one), ran with revolutionaries, and rose to become the Keeper of Italian Drawings at the Hermitage Museum. Francis, by contrast, appears genteel—an Oxford professor and grandson of an Iraqi Jew, raised in a world of ballet critics and quiet English antisemitism. Yet beneath his polished exterior lay years of isolation, repressed sexuality, and intellectual longing.
Their eventual meeting—and immediate understanding—is presented not as a fairy-tale romance, but as a synthesis of shared sensibilities. It is not a story of rescue or escape, but of two exiles finding home in each other. Pears insists, powerfully, that it was not the Russian woman who was set free by love—but the Englishman.
Literary Style: Melancholic, Erudite, Witty
Adapting Pears’ style in this review requires acknowledging his tonal duality. He writes with the analytical clarity of a scholar and the reflective warmth of a memoirist. The prose is elegant but never opaque, punctuated by irony, particularly when recounting Larissa’s sharp, almost mischievous wit or the genteel absurdities of British academia.
Pears plays the role of both narrator and interpreter—mediating between a world that is lost and a readership that has forgotten it. His voice is humane, nostalgic, and occasionally wry, never sentimental. There are passages that read like subtle eulogies, not just for Larissa and Francis, but for an entire cosmopolitan class—polyglot, mobile, deeply cultured, and now extinct.
Themes: Culture, Identity, and the Lost European Ideal
1. Pan-Europeanism Beyond Borders
Pears paints his protagonists as citizens of a vanished Europe: one not defined by the Iron Curtain but by shared cultural inheritance—ballet, literature, art, music. Larissa and Francis feel more at ease in foreign lands than in their own countries. They are cosmopolitans, not globalists; scholars, not tourists. Their marriage is framed as the embodiment of a lost ideal—of a Europe unified not by treaties but by sensibility.
2. Art as Refuge and Mirror
Unsurprisingly for a book involving two art historians, the text brims with meditations on the role of art—as political symbol, emotional outlet, and professional anchor. Larissa’s brilliant connoisseurship, her ability to identify a Tiepolo at 100 yards, is juxtaposed with Francis’s theoretical insights. Pears doesn’t just tell us who they were; he shows us how they saw the world, through Matisse and Piranesi and Tintoretto.
3. The Politics of Identity
The book is sensitive to the complications of Jewishness, Russianness, queerness, and gender in mid-century Europe. Francis’s struggle with his identity—his discomfort with his sexuality, his outsider status as a Jew at Eton—contrasts with Larissa’s fierce patriotism and simultaneous irreverence for authority. Her loyalty to Soviet ideals is genuine, even as she breaks every rule. His Englishness is performative, even as it fails to offer belonging.
Structure: A Narrative in Counterpoint
Pears arranges their lives in alternating chapters—Larissa and Francis—until they meet. This dual-biography format works brilliantly. Each life story illuminates the other: the siege of Leningrad gains resonance when viewed beside the English class system; Francis’s diaries, sharp with self-reproach and irony, counterbalance Larissa’s oral history, mischievous and elliptical.
After their 1962 meeting in Venice, the stories converge into a joint chronicle. The moment they meet—over lunch in a shabby Venetian trattoria—is understated but electric. It’s not just a turning point in their lives, but in the tone of the book, which shifts from individual histories to shared legacy.
Critique: Where the Book Falters
Though Parallel Lives is masterfully written, it is not a page-turner in the traditional sense. The pacing is reflective, meandering, and often weighed down by historical detail—fascinating for some readers, exhausting for others.
Potential Weaknesses:
- Density of historical context: At times, the reader may feel more like a student than a participant. Pears presumes a certain familiarity with Soviet and postwar European history, which may be daunting for casual readers.
- Fragmented emotional core: Because the couple doesn’t meet until nearly two-thirds through the book, the "love story" part feels like a denouement rather than a climax. This structural choice, while intellectually justified, may leave romantics underwhelmed.
- Selective memory: Pears is clear that he is reconstructing memory from both oral histories (Larissa’s interviews) and archival material (Francis’s diaries). But Larissa’s omissions—particularly about her first marriage—are significant. Pears is charmingly self-aware about this, but some readers may wish for a more comprehensive internal portrait.
Final Thoughts: A Story of Love, Yes—But Also of Loss
In a world saturated with formulaic love stories and over-filtered nostalgia, Parallel Lives stands apart. It is honest, eccentric, erudite. It is a love story that is not about passion, but recognition. About the invisible lines of class, history, and geography that form our identities—and how rare it is to find someone who sees the world as you do.
Larissa and Francis lived their lives in defiance of the categories they were born into. They were both insiders who never belonged. In that sense, Pears gives us not just a love story, but a portrait of a generation.
This book is a fitting tribute to them—and to a lost continent of ideas, aesthetics, and quiet courage.
Larissa’s life reads like a Tolstoyan epic: the daughter of a noble Soviet officer, she survived the Siege of Leningrad, lost a Matisse (and later "liberated" one), ran with revolutionaries, and rose to become the Keeper of Italian Drawings at the Hermitage Museum. Francis, by contrast, appears genteel—an Oxford professor and grandson of an Iraqi Jew, raised in a world of ballet critics and quiet English antisemitism. Yet beneath his polished exterior lay years of isolation, repressed sexuality, and intellectual longing.
Their eventual meeting—and immediate understanding—is presented not as a fairy-tale romance, but as a synthesis of shared sensibilities. It is not a story of rescue or escape, but of two exiles finding home in each other. Pears insists, powerfully, that it was not the Russian woman who was set free by love—but the Englishman.
Literary Style: Melancholic, Erudite, Witty
Adapting Pears’ style in this review requires acknowledging his tonal duality. He writes with the analytical clarity of a scholar and the reflective warmth of a memoirist. The prose is elegant but never opaque, punctuated by irony, particularly when recounting Larissa’s sharp, almost mischievous wit or the genteel absurdities of British academia.
Pears plays the role of both narrator and interpreter—mediating between a world that is lost and a readership that has forgotten it. His voice is humane, nostalgic, and occasionally wry, never sentimental. There are passages that read like subtle eulogies, not just for Larissa and Francis, but for an entire cosmopolitan class—polyglot, mobile, deeply cultured, and now extinct.
Themes: Culture, Identity, and the Lost European Ideal
1. Pan-Europeanism Beyond Borders
Pears paints his protagonists as citizens of a vanished Europe: one not defined by the Iron Curtain but by shared cultural inheritance—ballet, literature, art, music. Larissa and Francis feel more at ease in foreign lands than in their own countries. They are cosmopolitans, not globalists; scholars, not tourists. Their marriage is framed as the embodiment of a lost ideal—of a Europe unified not by treaties but by sensibility.
2. Art as Refuge and Mirror
Unsurprisingly for a book involving two art historians, the text brims with meditations on the role of art—as political symbol, emotional outlet, and professional anchor. Larissa’s brilliant connoisseurship, her ability to identify a Tiepolo at 100 yards, is juxtaposed with Francis’s theoretical insights. Pears doesn’t just tell us who they were; he shows us how they saw the world, through Matisse and Piranesi and Tintoretto.
3. The Politics of Identity
The book is sensitive to the complications of Jewishness, Russianness, queerness, and gender in mid-century Europe. Francis’s struggle with his identity—his discomfort with his sexuality, his outsider status as a Jew at Eton—contrasts with Larissa’s fierce patriotism and simultaneous irreverence for authority. Her loyalty to Soviet ideals is genuine, even as she breaks every rule. His Englishness is performative, even as it fails to offer belonging.
Structure: A Narrative in Counterpoint
Pears arranges their lives in alternating chapters—Larissa and Francis—until they meet. This dual-biography format works brilliantly. Each life story illuminates the other: the siege of Leningrad gains resonance when viewed beside the English class system; Francis’s diaries, sharp with self-reproach and irony, counterbalance Larissa’s oral history, mischievous and elliptical.
After their 1962 meeting in Venice, the stories converge into a joint chronicle. The moment they meet—over lunch in a shabby Venetian trattoria—is understated but electric. It’s not just a turning point in their lives, but in the tone of the book, which shifts from individual histories to shared legacy.
Critique: Where the Book Falters
Though Parallel Lives is masterfully written, it is not a page-turner in the traditional sense. The pacing is reflective, meandering, and often weighed down by historical detail—fascinating for some readers, exhausting for others.
Potential Weaknesses:
- Density of historical context: At times, the reader may feel more like a student than a participant. Pears presumes a certain familiarity with Soviet and postwar European history, which may be daunting for casual readers.
- Fragmented emotional core: Because the couple doesn’t meet until nearly two-thirds through the book, the "love story" part feels like a denouement rather than a climax. This structural choice, while intellectually justified, may leave romantics underwhelmed.
- Selective memory: Pears is clear that he is reconstructing memory from both oral histories (Larissa’s interviews) and archival material (Francis’s diaries). But Larissa’s omissions—particularly about her first marriage—are significant. Pears is charmingly self-aware about this, but some readers may wish for a more comprehensive internal portrait.
Final Thoughts: A Story of Love, Yes—But Also of Loss
In a world saturated with formulaic love stories and over-filtered nostalgia, Parallel Lives stands apart. It is honest, eccentric, erudite. It is a love story that is not about passion, but recognition. About the invisible lines of class, history, and geography that form our identities—and how rare it is to find someone who sees the world as you do.
Larissa and Francis lived their lives in defiance of the categories they were born into. They were both insiders who never belonged. In that sense, Pears gives us not just a love story, but a portrait of a generation.
This book is a fitting tribute to them—and to a lost continent of ideas, aesthetics, and quiet courage.
August 17, 2025
Iain Pears’ writing is always worth spending time with, but I didn’t love the story here the way I have with many of his previous novels.
What’s good about this is the tone and the style of the narrative. I love books where the narrator presents the story as though they are making an academic study of its characters, and this is an excellent example of why the approach works.
The story itself is just okay. Some of that was a taste issue for me (I’m not that shot with Cold War novels), and some of it is about the fact that the characters aren’t especially compelling and the story feels pretty small.
It’s also fairly lacking in art, which is a bit surprising for a book written by an art historian, but—more importantly—a bit disappointing for a book that claims to be predicated on art bringing characters together.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*
What’s good about this is the tone and the style of the narrative. I love books where the narrator presents the story as though they are making an academic study of its characters, and this is an excellent example of why the approach works.
The story itself is just okay. Some of that was a taste issue for me (I’m not that shot with Cold War novels), and some of it is about the fact that the characters aren’t especially compelling and the story feels pretty small.
It’s also fairly lacking in art, which is a bit surprising for a book written by an art historian, but—more importantly—a bit disappointing for a book that claims to be predicated on art bringing characters together.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*
October 21, 2025
enjoyed! the level of research helped the novel. how the characters sat in the geopolitical context was interesting and the asides relating to the history were fun. larissa as a character is just more interesting and fizzes off the page. francis’ struggles feel a bit small and silly next to larissa eating her neighbours cat to survive starvation.
August 6, 2025
Halfway through,it drags,but fascinating nonetheless.
June 18, 2025
Book Review: Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent by Iain Pears
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4/5)
🕊️ Huge thanks to W.W. Norton for the ARC 🕊️
💭 Quick Vibe Check:
If you’ve ever felt out of place in your own country, if you’ve wandered museums dreaming of lives long gone, or if you’ve loved someone not for rescuing you but for recognizing you—this book is for you.
Parallel Lives isn’t your average love story. It's intellectual, tender, and deeply nostalgic—a slow-burning, true account of two people from opposing worlds whose shared love of art and subtle rebellion draw them together. Larissa, the Soviet art curator with a past more layered than a palimpsest. Francis, the English scholar navigating quiet anguish and cultural dissonance. Their meeting is unexpected, but their connection feels inevitable.
❤️ What I LOVED:
• History with heart: This book doesn’t just drop names and dates—it lets history breathe through people.
• Art as language: Their romance speaks in the vocabulary of museums and lost paintings, which made every scene feel textured and beautiful.
• The tone?? Witty but melancholic. It felt like being let in on a private story, full of intelligence and affection.
• Unexpected parallels: From Russian bureaucracy to British repression, this is a book about outsiders who build a shared sense of home.
• Larissa's POV = ICONIC: Her wit, her contradictions, her sheer presence on the page? I’d read an entire book just of her quotes.
🧭 TROPES / THEMES:
• Star-crossed intellectuals
• Found home, not found family
• Biographical dual-narrative
• Culture, identity, and the quiet resistance of art
• Mid-century queer and Jewish marginalization
• Romance told in brushstrokes, not fireworks
📚 Final Thoughts:
This isn’t the book you read for action. It’s the book you curl up with on a quiet afternoon, when you want to feel something that lingers. Iain Pears writes like someone who respects your intelligence but still wants to tell you something soft and human.
I related to Larissa deeply—the fierce pride in one's heritage, tangled with anger at the institutions that try to define you. Her journey from Leningrad to the Hermitage, from forgeries to freedom, felt both fantastical and real. Her life, like so many others, wasn’t meant to be neat. But it was lived—messy, brave, and full of texture.
This book asks big questions: Can love transcend not just borders, but identities? Can two people who never felt at home in their countries find home in each other? And maybe most of all: what do we risk when we finally choose to see each other clearly?
Parallel Lives is less a sweeping romance than a quiet testament. It's about what’s possible when two people, shaped by the brutalities of their time, choose tenderness anyway.
A love story, yes—but more than that, a story of looking, and seeing.🖼️
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4/5)
🕊️ Huge thanks to W.W. Norton for the ARC 🕊️
💭 Quick Vibe Check:
If you’ve ever felt out of place in your own country, if you’ve wandered museums dreaming of lives long gone, or if you’ve loved someone not for rescuing you but for recognizing you—this book is for you.
Parallel Lives isn’t your average love story. It's intellectual, tender, and deeply nostalgic—a slow-burning, true account of two people from opposing worlds whose shared love of art and subtle rebellion draw them together. Larissa, the Soviet art curator with a past more layered than a palimpsest. Francis, the English scholar navigating quiet anguish and cultural dissonance. Their meeting is unexpected, but their connection feels inevitable.
❤️ What I LOVED:
• History with heart: This book doesn’t just drop names and dates—it lets history breathe through people.
• Art as language: Their romance speaks in the vocabulary of museums and lost paintings, which made every scene feel textured and beautiful.
• The tone?? Witty but melancholic. It felt like being let in on a private story, full of intelligence and affection.
• Unexpected parallels: From Russian bureaucracy to British repression, this is a book about outsiders who build a shared sense of home.
• Larissa's POV = ICONIC: Her wit, her contradictions, her sheer presence on the page? I’d read an entire book just of her quotes.
🧭 TROPES / THEMES:
• Star-crossed intellectuals
• Found home, not found family
• Biographical dual-narrative
• Culture, identity, and the quiet resistance of art
• Mid-century queer and Jewish marginalization
• Romance told in brushstrokes, not fireworks
📚 Final Thoughts:
This isn’t the book you read for action. It’s the book you curl up with on a quiet afternoon, when you want to feel something that lingers. Iain Pears writes like someone who respects your intelligence but still wants to tell you something soft and human.
I related to Larissa deeply—the fierce pride in one's heritage, tangled with anger at the institutions that try to define you. Her journey from Leningrad to the Hermitage, from forgeries to freedom, felt both fantastical and real. Her life, like so many others, wasn’t meant to be neat. But it was lived—messy, brave, and full of texture.
This book asks big questions: Can love transcend not just borders, but identities? Can two people who never felt at home in their countries find home in each other? And maybe most of all: what do we risk when we finally choose to see each other clearly?
Parallel Lives is less a sweeping romance than a quiet testament. It's about what’s possible when two people, shaped by the brutalities of their time, choose tenderness anyway.
A love story, yes—but more than that, a story of looking, and seeing.🖼️
May 21, 2025
This biographical account tells of the romance between British art historian Francis Haskell and Russian art historian Larissa Salmina, and is set against the backdrop of the Cold War. The two met by chance in Venice in 1962 and the attraction was immediate, although neither expected nor even particularly wanted to fall in love. Larissa was married but Francis was convinced no one would ever care for him. He had a troubled soul, battling with his sexuality, and Larissa was a Soviet citizen with a complex past and the weight of the state constraining her. But in spite of the sometimes seemingly intractable challenges and problems, they eventually married and embarked on a long and happy marriage. Pears gives the reader detailed portraits of both of them, drawing extensively from letters and diaries and his own conversations with Larissa until her death in 2024, chronicling their love across the political and cultural divide. It’s a truly compelling narrative, a fascinating story, narrated with insight and empathy and is an engaging account of an unlikely love affair that succeeded against all the odds.
June 11, 2025
It wasn’t long ago that someone from Russian would have had a difficult time leaving the country let alone dealing with the bureaucracy to marry a foreigner.
The fascinating story of Parallel Lives takes us inside the coming together of Larissa Salmina, a curator from the Hermitage and Francis Haskell, an art historian from England where he was established on the Cambridge faculty. The two meet while Larissa is in Venice as a representative of the Russian Government at the Biennale in 1962. Their shared enthusiasm for art, and their desire to discover more, bonded them together.
Larissa was married, but that was a minor detail, and it did not stop Francis from arranging other get togethers, even though her movement was supposed to be restricted. Larissa does push the relationship forward as Francis is a bit unsure of himself as a man and therefore only too happy when Larissa creates the bond.
They eventually live together in England, happily. Amazing to read about people from such different worlds finding love together.
October 19, 2025
A história real de duas pessoas que se encontram num continente dividido, geograficamente e ideologicamente, mas descobrem-se um ao outro no meio.
A história de Francis Haskell, académico britânico e figura maior da história da arte, e Larissa Salmina, curadora russa formada no cadinho duro da Leningrado soviética.
Conhecemos as versões deles do período da II Guerra Mundial, período da Guerra Fria, através dos arquivos, dos diários e da marca que deixaram no mundo da arte dão à narrativa um peso humano e histórico.
Achei a leitura densa e rica em pormenores históricos, no entanto não consegui ligar-me propriamente aos protagonistas reais. Esperava que o autor conseguisse fazer-me viver a vida destas personalidades históricas, mas não funcionou totalmente para mim.
No geral, é uma história madura e cheia de contexto, que nos leva por memórias duras, pela Europa do pós-guerra e a assistir a relações que resistem à maré do tempo.
A história de Francis Haskell, académico britânico e figura maior da história da arte, e Larissa Salmina, curadora russa formada no cadinho duro da Leningrado soviética.
Conhecemos as versões deles do período da II Guerra Mundial, período da Guerra Fria, através dos arquivos, dos diários e da marca que deixaram no mundo da arte dão à narrativa um peso humano e histórico.
Achei a leitura densa e rica em pormenores históricos, no entanto não consegui ligar-me propriamente aos protagonistas reais. Esperava que o autor conseguisse fazer-me viver a vida destas personalidades históricas, mas não funcionou totalmente para mim.
No geral, é uma história madura e cheia de contexto, que nos leva por memórias duras, pela Europa do pós-guerra e a assistir a relações que resistem à maré do tempo.
October 29, 2025
Pear's biography of Larissa Salmina, a Russian art curator, and Francis Haskell, a British art historian and a look back to Europe, Russia, Communism, the Cold War -- and how an unlikely and mismatched couple met and married in spite of Soviet threats and English suspicions. For me the most fascinating part was Larissa's job with the Hermitage and how she traveled throughout Europe as a young inexperienced woman with no more than a bit of moxie and confidence, transporting (and losing) some of the most significant art of Europe. Her story alone is worth a biography. Aside from drawing back the curtain on Soviet life among all the purges and bloodshed, Pears also exposes British strident social class structure and how Haskell, a Jew of Iraqi descent living and working in Cambridge, struggles with self doubt and acceptance until he meets the luminous Salmina.
December 3, 2025
This nonfiction story reads like a novel. In this book we follow an English boy and a Russian girl who are growing up during the turbulent times leading into the Cold War. They fall in love and marry and want to be together for the rest of their lives, but the circumstances of their lives and the obstacles keeping their story from being simple and straightforward make this book a different perspective on the history they are living through, as world events work their influence on this love story.
June 2, 2025
I can relate to Larissa. My “love of country “also coexists “quite easily with total distain for its rulers. “ and shortly before reading about how she was able to spend the “better part of a decade learning to look, see and understand“I was thinking about how grateful I was to work at a bookstore where I’m getting to learn so much.
July 28, 2025
This was a really fascinating view of two people, but also of the WWII and mid-century eras of Europe. I was a little disappointed that the book ended with Larissa and Francis's wedding with only a bit of an epilogue. They were fascinating people and I would have liked to read more about their life together. All in all, though, really worth reading.
November 12, 2025
I enjoyed this biography of two people I’d never heard of. The parts about Larissa Salmina and what she had to do to survive in Russia were interesting; the parts about Francis Haskell, not so much. The audiobook was well read by Richard Attlee.
August 8, 2025
Iain Pears has been one of my favorite writers. This one wazzzzzz…..
September 28, 2025
It is not as brilliant as Pears' other books, but fascinating non the less. Being both Jewish and of Russian descent makes the two perspectives closer, and somewhat familiar.
October 26, 2025
Thoroughly engaging and entertaining book. Larissa and Francis are characters that could not have been made up!! Such an interesting read!
November 11, 2025
Somehow this failed to engage me. But other people may think differently.
November 21, 2025
Lipped
book. Very moving. About art insecurities and life.
book. Very moving. About art insecurities and life.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews