Please join us as Caroline Mandler leads a discussion of Lara Prescott's The Secrets We Kept.

Lara Prescott’s debut novel weaves together a romance and a spy thriller, inspired by a true story. During the Cold War of the 1950s, the CIA hatches a plot to send two woman spies, posing as secretaries from the typing pool, into the Soviet Union to smuggle out the manuscript of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago. Interwoven with this plotline is the love story of Pasternak and the mistress who went to the Gulag rather than betraying him to Stalin. And, yes, that mistress became the inspiration for the literary heroine Lara of the famous novel and film. Bookpage wrote: “A whirlwind of storytelling. In Prescott’s supremely talented hands, the result is no less than endlessly fascinating, often deliciously fun, as well as heartbreaking. The Secrets We Kept is a dazzling, beguiling debut.”