1949: the celebrated Russian author Boris Pasternak is writing the novel that will become Doctor Zhivago. The Soviets, afraid of its subversive power, ban it. But in the rest of the world it is fast becoming a sensation. In Washington DC, the CIA is planning to use the book to tip the Cold War in its favour. However, their agents are not the usual spies. Two typists are charged with the mission of a lifetime: to smuggle Doctor Zhivago back into Russia...

Published in 1963, Charles Webb?s The Graduate was a sly and provocative first novel that is often overshadowed by the success of Mike Nichol?s sensational 1967 film. The Graduate is a novel that speaks to its time: a time when young Americans were beginning to question, for perhaps the first time, the materialistic values that the postwar culture had taught them. Its hero is at once worldly and naive, a dichotomy that won?t last for very long as...