This is the simplest story in the world. Two people meet and fall in love. But the journey that led Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell to a seaside restaurant in Venice in 1962 was anything but simple.

Lavissa was born in northern Russia, the daughter of a Soviet army officer from an aristocratic family, who survived the siege of Leningrad by eating cat tails and was evacuated over the ice. Francis was the grandson of an Iraqi Jew, who always felt out of place in the country he adopted, England. How they managed to meet and understand one another so deeply that both were ready to risk their emotional well-being is the story of this book.

Avoiding Leningrad, teenage Larissa lived in the Urals, surrounded by Spanish revolutionaries, became wild, and after the war evolved into the youngest Commissar in the Soviet Union and the Curator of Italian Designs at the Hermitage. At the same time, she honed her forgery skills and “liberated” a Matisse from the Italian government. She was a trained art expert and could spot a Tiepolo from 100 yards away.

Francis was a distinguished art historian, comfortable at King’s College Cambridge. But he was alone, filled with doubts, and had almost given up hope of falling in love or finding someone who would love him. Larissa erased all those years of pain in a single meal. Iain Pears' remarkable book brings into sharp focus the strange world of the Soviet Union and the even stranger world of a particular variety of the English elite.

Iain Pears knew his main characters well. His book is a history of Europe, not the Europe of geographical and ideological divisions, but of a particular mindset that was common to a few on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Whatever their differences in nationality, language, and politics, Larissa and Francis were members of a single, pan-European culture that paid little attention to the divisions that occupied most people of the time. It was a world of dancers, exiles, and occasional spies, artists, aristocrats, and academics. A world that seems to have been lost.

Pages: 288, Dimensions: 15.9x15.9cm