The Secrets We Kept

Based on a real CIA operation, this follows the effort to smuggle Doctor Zhivago out of the Soviet Union and use it as a weapon of cultural propaganda. Two strands alternate: the typists of the CIA secretarial pool, several of them former spies, and Olga Ivinskaya, Pasternak’s lover, who paid for the novel in the gulag. Prescott is very good on women whose work was essential and formally invisible.