Parallel Lives by Iain Pears

Parallel Lives by Iain Pears

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.

'A fascinating jigsaw puzzle of the lost continent of memory'

Financial Times

'This book contains multitudesYou don’t have to be an aesthete to love it. To read it is simply to enjoy good company, to revel in sublime writing and to be gently prodded into thoughts on the meaning of freedom and the transformative experience of love. It is a gorgeous book, a tender tribute to two originals and time well spent'

The Times

'Larissa leaps off the page, a born survivor with a terrific store of anecdotes: the cousin who was eaten by a bear, or the Matisse painting she stole from the Italian government and ‘repatriated’ to Russia…a warmly sympathetic book. On finishing, you’ll feel a glow that, against all the odds, this unlikely couple got their happy ever after'

Daily Mail

'A dramatic love story between two bespectacled art historians sounds implausible. But add in the Montague-Capulet effect of the Iron Curtain, along with a fearless Russian heroine who proved that love can conquer every barrier, and you have an enchanting tale: a completely true one, beautifully written by the art historian and novelist Iain Pears…Pears’s account provides a rollercoaster ride of hopes and fears, of secret trysts in non-aligned Yugoslavia, smuggled letters written in code, the Cuban missile crisis apparently ending all hopes of marriage, and then the threat of the hardline Leonid Brezhnev replacing Khrushchev. Yet a mixture of luck and Larissa’s inspired string-pulling within the Soviet system achieved success against the odds. The couple’s story is a wonderful tribute to the power of love overcoming a soulless ideology'

Spectator

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Praise for An Instance of the Fingerpost

'One of the very best historical novels ever written' Tom Holland

'The kind of book that has you reading it by torchlight under the bedclothes' The Times

Iain Pears is the author of the bestsellers An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Dream of Scipio, Stone’s Fall, and Arcadia, and a novella, The Portrait, as well as a series of acclaimed detective novels, a book of art history, and countless articles on artistic, financial and historical subjects. He lives in Oxford, England.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780008628963
ISBN 10	0008628963
Title	Parallel Lives
Author	Iain Pears
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers
Year published	2025-05-08
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.