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 f