'The Secrets We Kept' review: Spying is a woman's world

Did you enjoy "Doctor Zhivago" (either the film or the book)?

If you answered yes, then you will like "The Secrets We Kept." A lot.

In her ambitious debut, Lara Prescott unspools several concurrent stories, alternately from the "West" (mainly Washington, D.C.) and "East" (Russia) from 1949 to 1961. Each story runs alongside, or proves tangential to, that of author Boris Pasternak, concentrating on the period when he was struggling to get "Zhivago" published and the fatal cost of the ordeal to his health, especially after he was forced to refuse a Nobel Prize for the novel under totalitarian harassment.

Significantly, these are women's stories, including that of Pasternak's longtime mistress and muse, Olga Ivinskaya, who was sent twice to a Gulag labor camp (described in horrific detail) as a result of her affiliation with him.

But that story, while gripping, provides only a piece of the action. A pool of female typists in the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) in the 1950s, including American-born Sally Forrester and Russian-born Irina Drozdova, graduate to daring covert work, and more.

Prescott's hard-boiled depiction of D.C.'s intelligence community — its social and sexual hierarchies — gives readers a gritty insider tour of a "Mad Men"-redolent world where women had to work doubly hard to be taken as serious players, effectively doing everything backward and in heels. (Plenty of glamorous skulking occurs in hotels and bars, and much gets accomplished between hangovers.) Such is the thoroughness of Prescott's research and the crispness of her delivery that the novel reads almost like a documentary, itemizing cultural milestones and emblems (Nat King Cole, Sputnik, Alka-Seltzer) alongside women's courageous contributions to postwar heroism.

It is satisfying to witness these women's evolutions, their stamina, wit and canny determination: enmeshed in multitiered battles for the survival of those principles for which so very, very many sacrificed themselves. Without a speck of sentiment, Prescott has built an impassioned testament to them. Reading "Secrets" affords a pleasurable, inspiring way to absorb unsung history.