The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott
The words secretary and secret have the same Latin root. The women who work as secretaries for the CIA are expected to prepare necessary documents and immediately forget what they have typed.
At the height of the Cold War, Irina is hired by the CIA as a secretary. But it isn't her secretarial skills that the agency is interested in - they are far more interested in her Russian background and ability to blend in without attracting attention. Sally Forrester, a long-time operative, trains Irina on how to dress, how to act, how to perform a switch without anyone noticing. At first, Irina works as a courier, picking up and dropping off information and documents. One of her most important assignments is to meet a British agent and pick up two rolls of microfilm that contain the Russian text for the novel Dr. Zhivago, which has been smuggled out of Soviet Russia.
At his dacha outside Moscow, Boris Pasternak has completed one of the greatest novels ever written, yet he is unable to obtain permission to have the text published in the Soviet Union. The Communist government feels that since the story is set against the backdrop of the 1918 Russian Revolution, it is critical of the Soviet government. Pasternak makes the momentous decision to smuggle the text out of Russia to Western Europe, where it will be translated and published to world-wide acclaim. But Pasternak's decision has dire consequences for himself and his lover Olga (the inspiration for Lara).
Dr. Zhivago has always been one of my favorite novels, so I was fascinated by the background on how it came to be published. I knew that Pasternak had been awarded the Nobel Prize for the novel, but I had no idea about the controversy that ensued. Well-researched and vibrantly told, The Secrets We Kept will appeal to readers of historical fiction as well as anyone interested in Soviet Russia during the Cold War, Boris Pasternak, or a legendary literary love story.
Boris Pasternak - very brooding Russian look
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an e-ARC in return for a review.
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