Lara Prescott: The Secrets we kept, 9781786331670, Cornerstone, Penguin Random House UK, C format paperback, pub date September 5, 2019

I can barely believe that “The Secrets we kept” is Lara Prescott’s first novel. Her superbly reimagined story is based on facts around the publication of one of the most well-known books in literature, Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” for which he won the Nobel Prize.

Alternating between the seemingly invisible women in the CIA’s typing pool, two female agents, Irina and Sally, and Pasternak and his family in Russia, this captvating story around a literary masterpiece kept me firmly in its grip. The chapters set in Russia around Boris Pasternak and his mistress Olga Iwinskaja are my favourites, they touched me the most.

I was completely oblivious to the fact of the  CIA’s involvement in using the publication of “Doktor Schivago” as is the title in German and literature as such as a weapon against the Russians during the cold war, something which was only recently brought to life when documents were declassified. As someone who has worked in publishing almost her entire life, I was absolutely fascinated by this marvelous tale and was equally ignorant andshocked that Olga, Pasternak’s agent and lifelong mistress, was punished to several years of labour in Gulags paying the ultimate price for loving Pasternak and helping the novel come to life.

Feltrinelli, the great Italian publisher, mastered the ultimate coup in getting the censored book out of Russia publishing it despite the danger it posed to the lives of the author and his loved ones, believing in the power of this masterpiece. "Go find me the next Russian Nobel Prize winner", he was rumored to have said to his scouting agent and so he did.

I do not want to go too deeply into details of the book around the publication of “Doctor Zhivago” as it would spoil the entire pleasure of reading this vividly constructed novel about one of literature’s great classics, a book Stalin and his successors were so deeply afraid of banning from publication in Russia. I urge you to buy a copy of “The Secrets we kept” and promise you a page turning read once it comes out September 5th.