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.

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.

Larissa was born in northern Russia, the daughter of a Soviet army officer from a noble family who survived the siege of Leningrad by eating cats’ tails and being evacuated over the ice. Francis was the grandson of an Iraqi Jew, forever feeling out of place in his adopted country of England. How they could meet and instantly understand each other so profoundly that both were prepared to risk heartbreak, and in her case, retribution, to be together is the story of this book.

Escaping Leningrad, teenage Larissa lived in the Urals surrounded by Spanish revolutionaries, went feral and after the war rose to become the youngest Commissar in the Soviet Union and Keeper of Italian Drawings at the Hermitage. She took the Russian contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1962 and lost it on the journey. She briefly absconded with her supervisor’s corpse, developed a useful sideline in forgery, and stole (“I didn’t steal it. I liberated it”) a Matisse from the Italian government. She was a trained connoisseur and could spot a Tiepolo at 100 yards.

Francis was a distinguished art historian, comfortably at home in King’s College Cambridge. But he was lonely, self-doubting and had all but abandoned hope of falling in love, or finding anyone who could love him. Larissa swept away all the years of anguish in one meal. Bestselling novelist and art historian Iain Pears’ fabulous book brings into sharp focus the strange world of the Soviet Union, and the even stranger world of a certain variety of the English elite. It seeks to show how leaving the Soviet Union was a sacrifice for her and how it was the English man, not the Russian woman, who was set free because of their meeting.

Iain Pears knew both his principal characters well. His book is a story of Europe; not the Europe of geographical and ideological divisions but of a certain mentality which was common to a few on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Whatever their differences in nationality, language, and politics, both Larissa and Francis were members of a unified, pan-European culture which paid little heed to the divisions which so pre-occupied most people of the age. It also operated by very different rules and values to the societies in which they existed. It was a world of dancers, exiles, and the occasional spy, of artists, aristocrats, and academics. It consisted of people who only felt safe when they were away from home, were comfortable only in the company of foreigners. It is a tale of a world we seem to have lost.

Details

ISBN13: 9780008628963
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 288
Edition:
Publication Date: 27 Aug 2025
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 24(H)x15.9(L)x2.7(W)480
Weight (gm): 480

Author Biography

Iain Pears was born in 1955, educated at Wadham College, Oxford and won the Getty Scholarship to Yale University. He has worked as a journalist, an art historian and a television consultant. He is the author of many books, including the bestselling An Instance of the Fingerpost and The Dream Of Scipio.He lives with his wife and son in Oxford.

Reviews

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

Financial Times

'This book contains multitudes. You 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