The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

This is a fictionalised account of the banning of Boris Pasternak's novel, Dr Zhivago, by the USSR and the CIA's decision to publish his work clandestinely, as a way of letting Russian citizens know what is being kept from them in both information and literature. Two female spies are instrumental in smuggling the manuscript out of the USSR and into the hands of Italian pubilshers. Their own love story is skillfully interwoven into the main tale. But perhaps most of all, this is the story of Pasternak's muse and lover, Olga Ivinskaya.

- Noelle