Book giveaway for Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent by Iain Pears Mar 28-Apr 27, 2025

Book Giveaway For Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent

Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent

Release date: Aug 05, 2025

This is the simplest tale in the world. Two people meet and fall in love. But the route which brought Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell to a backstr This is the simplest tale in the world. Two people meet and fall in love. But the route which brought Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell to a backstreet Venetian restaurant in 1962 was anything but straightforward.

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鈥� 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. How they could meet and instantly understand each other so profoundly that both were prepared to risk heartbreak, and in her case, retribution, to be together is the story of this book.

Escaping Leningrad, teenage Larissa lived in the Urals surrounded by Spanish revolutionaries, went feral 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鈥檚 corpse, developed a useful sideline in forgery, and stole (鈥淚 didn鈥檛 steal it. I liberated it鈥�) a Matisse from the Italian government. She was a trained connoisseur and could spot a Tiepolo at 100 yards.

Francis was a distinguished art historian, comfortably at home in King鈥檚 College Cambridge. But he was lonely, self-doubting and had all but abandoned hope of falling in love, or finding anyone who could love him. Larissa swept away all the years of anguish in one meal. Bestselling novelist and art historian Iain Pears鈥� 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.

Iain Pears knew both his principal characters well. His book is a story of Europe; not the Europe of geographical and ideological divisions but of a certain mentality which was common to a few on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Whatever their differences in nationality, language, and politics, both Larissa and Francis were members of a unified, pan-European culture which paid little heed to the divisions which so pre-occupied most people of the age. It also operated by very different rules and values to the societies in which they existed. It was a world of dancers, exiles, and the occasional spy, of artists, aristocrats, and academics. It consisted of people who only felt safe when they were away from home, were comfortable only in the company of foreigners. It is a tale of a world we seem to have lost. ...more

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Format: Print book

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Availability: 40 copies available, 2671 people requesting

Giveaway dates: Mar 28 - Apr 27, 2025

Countries available: U.S.

About Iain Pears

Iain 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 ...more

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