Parallel Lives

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...