A very interesting story about the background behind the book 'Doctor Zhivago'. Also an interesting story about the typists working at Langley in the Cold War. Another interesting story about the women who listened to secrets for a living. However none of the stories really had much to do with the other, which was a real shame. I kept waiting for the connection, but there wasn't one.

I resisted this because I don't know anything about Doctor Zhivago, and also in part because of all the hype this book was getting - but it was not what I expected at all. I found this story fascinating, the dichotomy between east and west, and the way truths can be misrepresented and mean different things to different people. The structure didn't work for me as an ebook but it was excellent in hard copy to follow all the different characters and their significance to the overarching story. A captivating book, stark in its realities but with underlying heart.

An interesting enough book to read although not sure if the book is based on truth or if it is was a book of fiction. I enjoyed the way it jumped back and forth between the main characters as normally I am not a fan of that style but in this case it made sense.

"I absolutely loved this book.
Given that I know the story of Doctor Zhivago and am familiar with the story of Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivlinskaya, it was interesting to see what Western author would make out of their story. I am left reeling by it. Author has done a great job painting the image of a talented writer but self-centered, narcissistic and weak man living his earth-bound life between two women, making both of them miserable.
However, I was more interested in the 'American' part of the story. I loved the girls from the typing pool and Sally and Irina. Creating Russian-American girl with so many talents and so many peculiarities was a job and a half, and author managed it perfectly. Story of Sally and Irina is a sad one and it adds another layer to the veil of 'secrets we kept'
Secrets born out of secrets and carried on the backs of other secrets. And it is all done in pencil skirts, colourful capes and silk stockings.
Life of an agent is hard and lonely. But what about a double agent's life? What about lonelines and hardness expounded by your origins or your inclinations or your life choices?
Amazing book. A very worthy read for all interested in Cold War era.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy through the lenses of typing pool girls. "

A fascinating story from the 1950s based on the true story of Boris Pasternak’s struggle to get 'Dr Zhivago' published in the USSR. A great blend of fact and fiction combined with a forbidden love story make for a great fantastic read.

An absorbing and ambitious novel which any lover of Doctor Zhivago should enjoy. The relationship between its author and his younger lover; Pasternak’s fall from grace as a favoured Russian author; the struggle to get his book published in the West and the US plan to use Pasternak’s book as a tool to destabilise communism - all of this is explored in The Secrets We Kept. It also shines a light on the experience of women in the US security services in the 50s, showing how even seasoned 2nd world war operatives were expected to become secretaries and let the men shine. Fascinating and engrossing.

An excellent story that keeps you interested as you dip between characters as they take on different roles. Definitely recommended to those who enjoy this type of book.

Writing a book about a famous novel.

This is a compelling story from the 1950s, based on the true account of Boris Pasternak’s struggle when writing his famous book “Dr Zhivago” and his ordeal in getting it published in the repressive USSR. In the end, the book is smuggled out, first to Italy and then to the States. The story of how this is done is the essence of this novel, which although fiction has real facts at the heart of it.

The action takes place in both the West and the East, where the struggle to get Pasternak’s book published forms the basis of the book. It turns out; both sides are struggling to keep their secrets safe.

In the West, the setting is in Washington, in the female typing pool of the CIA. The two most favoured of the women, Sally and Irina, turn out to be not only typists but also spies, tasked with the job of getting “Dr Zhivago” out of Soviet Russia where it has been banned. This isn’t the only secret these two women have to keep. They are also in love, a dangerous relationship that is forbidden at this time and has to remain hidden. When it is finally discovered it has a drastic effect on both their lives.

In the East, the story turns on the struggle of Pasternak to finish his story, He is not only denounced by the regime, but he sees his mistress dragged off to the camps in punishment. Her terrible ordeal lasts for three years, and even after her return they both feel the full effect of the regime and live with suppression and fear. His book is refused publication in his homeland, but once it has been smuggled out to the West to great acclaim, Pasternak, to ensure their survival, is forced to turn down his award of the Nobel Prize for literature. He lives under the strain of rejection and reprisal. In the end, this destroys his health.

The story is a good one, and the parallels of love and war are cleverly shown. A great deal of research has been done. However, the start is plodding and hard to follow. The central part of the story takes too long to get going. Many will be put off by this, but once it does begin on the Pasternak story, it becomes hard to put down.

It also makes us realise how lucky we are to have the freedom in which to write.


Jane

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of this book to review

Rating: 3.5/5
Overall:
Wasn’t quite what I expected. I spent the first half of the book pretty lost and unsure who was who or what was really going on. I even took 3.5 hours out to watch Doctor Zhivago to see if it would help - it didn’t!
After the half way mark, I really started to enjoy the book and struggled to put it down. I loved the typists chapters and was surprised by where the storyline went (no spoilers!). As I got closer to the end, the actual ‘twist’ wasn’t entirely unexpected, and I had a feeling that was coming. Overall, I did enjoy the book but felt the first half could have been a bit different to make it easier to understand/tie together. I wanted this book to wow me and it didn’t quite get there.

In the nineteen fifties and sixties, when the Cold War was at its height, the U.S. government set out to distribute literature banned by the Communist Government, inside the USSR. One such book was Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago.
This novel is about that book, it’s author, his mistress, and the CIA team who took the banned book back to the land of its birth - at the time, this was an important act of anti-Soviet propaganda, a rebuke to Soviet oppression, meant to embarrass the Communist Party and Soviet leaders. This is the history, the facts at the heart of The Secrets We Kept, but the story is told by a cast of historical and fictional characters. In America, the narrators are Irina Drozdova, a Russian-American typist at the CIA, promoted to drops and field work. Sally Forrester, a beautiful, experienced agent assigned to coach Irina in spycraft. Teddy Helms, a boorish CIA man who becomes romantically involved with Irina, and the Typing Pool, who speak as one, as ‘we’. In the East, there is only one voice, Olga Vsevolodovna, Pasternak’s mistress, and inspiration for the beautiful Lara of his novel. I sometimes had trouble with the multiple voices. There are many different characters and it did get confusing. It wasn’t always immediately apparent which character was speaking (but this may have been compounded by the formatting problems of the review copy I was sent).
On both sides of the divide, it is the women who always come off worst. In the East, Olga is a pawn, sent to a brutal Siberian labour camp for three years to pressure and punish her lover Pasternak. In the west, the women have more apparent freedom, but their lives are strictly limited, they must never progress or proceed to the same extent as men. All the females at the CIA are exploited to some degree by their male controllers; they have little control over their own lives. In Russia, the once popular and lauded Pasternak struggles against daily oppression for having written a critical book, but it is Olga who is sent to the Gulag on trumped up charges, sentenced to suffer to put pressure on Boris. In the free west, the women do not suffer imprisonment and deprivation, but their lives are constrained in more subtle ways. The women are all well-educated and experienced; many had done serious and covert work in the war, but find themselves consigned to menial tasks in peacetime, in jobs ‘suitable for women’; something to do till they found a husband. As the typing pool says,
“We came to the Agency by way of Radcliffe, Vassar, Smith. We were the first daughters of our families to earn degrees. Some of us spoke Mandarin. Some could fly plans. Some of us could handle a Colt 1873 better than John Wayne. But all we were asked when interviewed was ‘Can you type?’”
Like Zhivago, this novel is about love as much as it is about politics. There are two love stories, that of Pasternak and his mistress Olga, and Irina and Sally, who meet at work and fall in love and begin a clandestine affair. Needless to say (and I don’t think this amounts to a spoiler), things do not go well once the sexuality of one of them is discovered.
The story is about spies, but it is not a spy novel. If you’re looking for a suspenseful read, or a classic page turner, this is not it. This is more Mad Men than Harry Palmer. The Secrets We Kept is slow. It is a book that looks deeply into its characters, their lives and their loves. It is not a thriller.
I have found this a hard review to write because, though I did enjoy the book, it was very absorbing, I find, having reached the end, that I have very little to say about it. It has left no deep impressions on me. Fictionalising real events is a good way to tell a history. Like Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, it works wonderfully when done well. Here, it is done competently. I liked it, but it didn’t shake my world or leave me wanting more. It engaged me, but didn’t enthral. It is a good book, but not a great one.

This fascinating book revolves around smuggling the manuscript of Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago out of Russia, its subsequent publication in Italy and its translation into English. Sounds boring? Not a bit of it. You have the Russians not wanting it published at all because of what it told of life in Russia, Then there are the Americans,desperate to get a copy so that it can feed illicit copies back into Russia to destabilise the population as they learn what their Government actually is doing.. (All good Cold War stuff.) And then in Italy, Feltrinelli, a wealth man, simply wants to publish it because he feels strongly that good literature, from wherever, should always be published. So strong is this belief, the fact that he was himself a fierce advocate of left wing views and support for Communism did not deter him in his mission even if it incurred the wrath of the Russian Government.
Cleverly, Prescott recounts the story through the eyes of people involved in some way. So you have, for example, Chapters where we see the lives of Typists in the CIA, then there is what the Carrier was up to or the Agent or the Emissary and then Pasternak, his wife and his muse. All have "Secrets we kept".
The result is both well researched and well written. You quickly forget that parts of it are simply fiction.
Highly recommended

I can honestly say this is the best book I’ve read this year. This is a literary thriller in the form of fiction non-fiction. That is, it is a story about true, factually documented events, but with a fictional interpretation as to some details in order to round it out.

The book begins at the dawn of the 1950s and takes it in turns, a few chapters at a time, to tell the story from two perspectives: East and West. In the West we have Irina, born in the US to a mother who escaped from Russia. Her Father didn’t make it, which gives Irina a motivation the CIA recognises in her, long before she does: a hatred for the Soviet regime which outweighs patriotism for the USA. Irina is offered a job in a government typing pool, she knows she’s not the fastest typist, but her employers recognise the potential power of some innate qualities she possesses. Over in the East we follow Olga, the muse of Boris Pasternak Russia’s premier writer. Boris spends some time in his Dacha writing and being looked after by his wife. The rest of his time he spends in Moscow with Olga, they often attend gatherings where he reads sections from the magnum opus he is writing entitled Dr Zhivago. The government learns that in depicting the limitations placed upon the characters in his love story, Boris’s writing is subversive. They arrest his muse; when she then fails to reveal details of the book she is sent to a gulag. The story follows the characters over the next decade.

This book is very well written; a good pace woven with the right level of detail make for an immersive reading experience. Switching between the spies of the West and the lovers of the East, the plot is in turn thrilling and emotional; I am in awe that this is Lara Prescott’s debut work. This is a great literary thriller, but it is also so much more: an historical snapshot of a world divided by political ideology, an acknowledgement of the influence of art for propaganda, a recognition of the (often unseen) power of women and a tribute to the value of freedom of expression.

In the late 1950s, the CIA published Russian copies of Doctor Zhivago and smuggled them behind the Iron Curtain in order to spark an unrest among Soviet citizens. In The Secrets We Kept, Lara Prescott explores the women who may have helped the mission, as well as the intriguing relationship between Russian author Boris Pasternak and his mistress Olga, who is known to have inspired the Doctor Zhivago character Lara.

I really enjoyed this book, and learning some really amazing things about the revolutionary Doctor Zhivago which I never knew before. I definitely have to put my hands up and admit that, at the time of writing, I have yet to read Doctor Zhivago but I have very much enjoyed the BBC mini series of it with Keira Knightley, which I'm pretty sure we got free DVDs of in the Sunday paper!

The complexities of all the female characters in this really drew me in, and the amount of character growth we see (particularly with Irina). I loved the chapters from the 'typists' in the CIA, and how this book also focused on women who had done some amazing things during the war and then been relegated to secretarial and homemaking duties once the men came home, and how hard this was for a majority of them.

I will say that I feel like I did want something more from this book. I think I expected to be wowed and I didn't quite get that wow moment - and I really felt like the reader would eventually get more from Irina and Sally's relationship, and it definitely felt more like it just meandered away a bit sad and disappointing.

Besides that, the history behind this book really just fascinated me, and I think Lara Prescott did a great way in bringing it to life using some fictional characters.

Unfortunately I found the book difficult to get into. Having read a quarter of the book, I would not have known where the disjointed ramblings were going if I hadn't read the synopsis. Although the book gets better, I didn't enjoy it.

The Secrets We Kept is honestly one of the most interesting and captivating books I have ever read. I fell in love with Dr Zhivago and so I was intrigued to read the story behind the book and the man who wrote it. Meticulously researched and so beautifully written, The Secrets We Kept is a triumph. Shifting between East and West we learn how America employed agents to smuggle microfilms of the original Russian manuscript out of London, and copies were printed and given to Soviets at Expo 58 in Brussels. As the Cold War accelerated, America saw Dr Zhivago as 'not just a book, but a weapon and one the Agency wanted to obtain and smuggle back behind the Iron Curtain for its own citizens to detonate'. As the book was taken back to the USSR and black market copies proliferated, Pasternak became an enemy of the state, his book being banned in his homeland due to its criticism of the October Revolution. Invited to accept a nomination for the Nobel Prize, he is forced to decline, as to do otherwise would put his life in even more danger. But we also learn about the lives of the agents who were instrumental in making sure that Russian citizens got to read this work of literature that the State worked so hard to suppress. Boris Pasternak's mistress and muse, Olga, herself is arrested and sentenced to hard labour following the death of the author and this is the second time for her. She sacrificed so much for the love of Boris, and ultimately, despite his work being read and applauded worldwide, the publication led to tragedy and heartbreak as he was declared a traitor to this country. Having long had a fascination with Russian history and literature, this book transported me to another time, one that is hard to imagine. For those who have read Dr Zhivago, they will know it is, above all else, a love story. To think that the author and those connected to him were threatened with their lives over a work of literature, seems incredible. Lara Prescott has done an absolutely amazing job with this book and it's after completing The Secrets We Kept, I feel compelled to reread the inspiration for it. Cannot recommend this book enough, absolutely brilliant.

My thank to Netgalley and to the publishers for the opportunity to review this novel.

The Secrets We Kept will send you back to read or re-read Doctor Zhivago, as it tells us of the events around the completion of the work in the context of the hostile state. It takes the reader to the gulag, to the forests and the cities of the Soviet State, while telling the story of the novel being taken to the west for translation and publication. Then we follow the novel back to the Motherland via the two talented women who help smuggle copies back to the USSR so that they can be read by the citizens of the country.

It is a story of creativity, of the challenges faced by a writer when he is writing against the regime in which he lives, a story of love and the ways we can express that love.

A richly evocative telling of the birth of a masterpiece.

This was a really fascinating character study of the women in the intelligence community and I really enjoyed it. Based on a true story, the novel explores the writing of Doctor Zhivago in the USSR during the Cold War and the way in which the novel was used by the CIA for propaganda purposes. Told from multiple perspectives, the narrative gives a really well rounded account of the years immediately preceding and following the novel and I found the level of detail lent a real authenticity to the action, which I really appreciated. I think it's important to note that this isn't a fast-paced, action packed spy novel. Instead, it is a nuanced and balanced examination of the individuals involved and we are given the time and space to really get to know them on an emotional level. I found the relationships and motivations completely believable and I loved the way that Prescott weaves the narrative and forwards the plot by focusing on the characters. This type of narrative won't appeal to those who enjoy the pacier type of thriller, but anyone who appreciates amazing characters, will enjoy this story.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I struggled to read this book on my kindle, due to the Title coming up on so many pages. It was an interesting book, and very enlightening to read about Boris Pasternak and how Dr Zhivago could not be published in Russia.
Thanks to Netgalley for an Arc.

First thing to say- is how confident and allusive is the writing .. voices well sketched out .. a chorus of girls too in the typing pool .. gives an extra intriguing dimension.. but I have to say it took a long time for what seemed like 2 or 3 strands in this sort of came together in this story of boris pasternak's world class novel dr zhicago.. all along, tbe book cleverly assumes we know it .. the writing in contemporary times and then also his mistress' suffering for him in the past, are excellently almost poetically put to us. The machinations of getting the book published in Italy first are well known but never so well and brilliantly set out as here. Highly recommended.

A bidding war, sold in twenty-five countries and September’s choice in Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club, The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott is causing quite the stir. But is it worth all the hype?

My answer? Yes.

This has everything that I really enjoy in a book, a dash of history, a sprinkle of multi-person narrative and a hefty dose of intrigue and suspense.

The Secrets We Kept examines the true story of the publication of Doctor Zhivago, a novel which shines a spotlight on life in Russia. Banned by the Russian Government as a piece of subversive literature it was subsequently published in Europe and then smuggled back into Russia by the Americans. Books are powerful. They contain knowledge and that can be dangerous in a country such as Russia. At the peak of the Cold War America used Doctor Zhivago, a Russian literary masterpiece against them to gain a foothold.

Set predominantly in the 1950s in both America and Russia we are given a front row seat to the events that took place. Told from the perspective of a group of astounding women we are immersed head first into a man’s world.

First there are the chorus of Typists who during the war were intelligence officers in the Office of Strategic Services. They can fly planes, speak Mandarin and run black ops but in post-war America they “type a hundred words per minute” and are referred to by their (male) superiors “not by name but by hair color or body type: blondie, red, tits.”

When a new typist, Irina, joins the ranks she ruffles their feathers. Brought up in America by a Russian mother she is completely different to the women in the typing pool and merges into the background. It is this ability that catches the eye of the men in power and she soon finds that she has more value than she originally thought. I really liked Irina finding her a likeable and brave character. I looked forward to her chapters and was entranced by her friendship with Sally, a CIA operative who is part of the team tasked with smuggling Doctor Zhivago into Russia. They are both wonderfully drawn characters who I really cared for.

But it was the sections in Russia that I particularly enjoyed with Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, and his relationship with his mistress, Olga being the thing that everything else orbits around. She is a driving force and his inspiration and it is through her that we learn about the horrors of living in communist Russia. There are some brutal and heartbreaking moments, particularly when it comes to Boris and Olga’s relationship which I found very moving.

At it’s heart though is the strong women who exist within the pages of the book. The Typists, Irina, Sally, Olga; all women in a man’s world and yet, they are at the heart of power. It is Olga who encourages Boris to try and get his manuscript published in Russia. It is Sally who can make herself become somebody else, taking on a new character the way we would put on a coat. It is Irina who finds bravery and fearlessness and becomes a central player in a major Cold War Operation. And it is the Typists who are keeper of secrets, who read the memos and know more about the inner workings of the CIA than anybody else.

And then there is the brutal and beautiful examination of love and its many facets. Olga and Boris yes, but also parental love, illicit love and love for your country. In a book filled with espionage, terror and threat, love shines like a beacon, giving hope.

If historical novels with intrigue, suspense and fearless female characters are your thing then this could be the book for you. It comes recommended from me.