PARALLEL LIVES A Love Story from a Lost Continent

Actor Richard Attlee has the rare ability among audiobook narrators of extracting full value from each word and syllable while seeming to do nothing at all. What in a lesser narrative might have seemed affected here achieves a singular ease and naturalism. Art historian Pears's richly detailed, expertly written "Love Story from a Lost Continent" comes from firsthand acquaintance with the Russian woman Larissa Salmina and British man Francis Haskell who, after vastly different pasts, met and fell in love in Venice in 1962. Their immediate affinity, set at the very height of the Cold War, represents a common European culture based on reading and the arts that defied borders and ideologies--a Europe now irredeemably lost. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine [Published: AUGUST 2025]