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Parallel Lives : A Love Story from a Lost Continent by Iain Pears (2025, Hardcover)
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About this product
Product Identifiers
PublisherNorton & Company, Incorporated, w. w.
ISBN-101324073772
ISBN-139781324073772
eBay Product ID (ePID)15071323114
Product Key Features
Book TitleParallel Lives : a Love Story from a Lost Continent
Number of Pages288 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication Year2025
TopicCultural Heritage, Europe / Great Britain / 20th Century
GenreBiography & Autobiography, History
AuthorIain Pears
FormatHardcover
Dimensions
Item Height1.1 in
Item Weight17.1 Oz
Item Length9.3 in
Item Width6.3 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceTrade
Dewey Edition23
Dewey Decimal947.085092
SynopsisAn 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 era: a world of dancers, exiles, and the occasional spy, of artists, aristocrats, and academics. It is a tale of a world we have lost.
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