The Secrets We Kept

Starred review from July 1, 2019
Prescott’s triumphant debut offers a fresh perspective on women employed by the CIA during the 1950s and their role in disseminating into the Soviet Union copies of Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak’s banned masterpiece. In 1956, American-born Irina Drozdova gets a job at the CIA ostensibly as a typist but is destined for fieldwork. Former OSS agent Sally Forrester trains Irina in spycraft. Meanwhile, inside the Soviet Union, Boris Pasternak’s lover, Olga Vsevolodovna, is interrogated about Pasternak’s work in progress, Dr. Zhivago. After three years in a prison camp, she reunites with Pasternak, who, unable to publish in the Soviet Union, entrusts his novel to an Italian publisher’s representative. Back in Washington, Irina, now engaged to a male agent but in love with Sally, seeks assignment overseas. Dressed as a nun, she places copies of Dr. Zhivago, printed in the original Russian for the CIA, into the hands of Soviet citizens visiting the Vienna World’s Fair. Through lucid images and vibrant storytelling, Prescott creates an edgy postfeminist vision of the Cold War, encompassing Sputnik to glasnost, typing pool to gulag, for a smart, lively page-turner. This debut shines as spy story, publication thriller, and historical romance with a twist. 200,000-copy announced first printing.

This ensemble performance of Laura Prescott's novel, told from multiple points of view, reimagines from a female perspective one of the great Cold War coups--the smuggling into the West and publication in 1958 of Boris Pasternak's DR. ZHIVAGO. In Washington, the narrators include "The Typists" at CIA headquarters, a young Russian-speaking agent, and a glamorous senior agent suspected of homosexuality. In Russia, the voice is Olga's, Zhivago's Lara, whose sufferings parallel and illuminate the fate of each character in the story. The novel's interacting themes and parallels are wonderfully captured by the accomplished cast, who render these voices with such spirit and comprehension. One caution: The author doesn't identify the narrator of new chapters; it helps to repeat the first quarter minute or so. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine