Parallel Lines

Edith Tudor-Hart was a Bauhaus-trained photographer, and Ursula Kuczynski a writer and polyglot. Both were immigrant dissidents fighting fascism throughout the turbulent 30s and 40s. They never met, and yet communist agents, radical activists and devoted mothers both, their lives regularly crossed on the leafy streets of Hampstead and in the sophisticatedly bohemian world of the Isokon building – a haven for free-thinking émigrés and modernist marvel that promised a new way of living. Together but apart, they changed history – one helping form the famous Cambridge Five spy ring, the other handler of the nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs. They were denied the chance to share the dangers they faced, but the secret nature of their work tied them by invisible threads. Maryam Diener is masterful at the blending of fact and fiction. In Parallel Lives she traces the haunting secrets, traumas and victories that bound these remarkable women.