Thalia Marguerite Titania Bobrov travels with her mother from their quiet home in Smolensk to the Capital of Russia, St Petersburg, to stay with her maternal grandmother who is the youngest sister of the Dowager Empress of Russia and mother to the Tsar. Thalia is to be presented at court and launched into the glittering society of Russian Aristocracy. During her new life, Thalia meets and falls in love with Prince Nicholas Ivanov, cousin to the Tsar and her mother’s cousin. Set between the glittering society of the aristocracy and the harsh realities and cruelty leading to war and the Russian Revolution. Thalia learns new strengths as she passes between the rich and the poor. She trains with the Tsarina and two oldest daughters to become a nurse at Tsarskoye Selo which has partly been converted to a hospital for the injured Russian victims of war. In her new life Thalia meets all the Royal family which she is related to, the famed Peter Karl Faberge, known for the famous Faberge Eggs, known worldwide, and the lecherous Father Gregory Rasputin, whose unwanted attentions Thalia has caught. When the Tsar is forced to abdicate, and the royal family are kept under house arrest, Thalia and her family are forced to flee for their lives and make a home thousands of miles from their beloved homeland of Russia.

“Convincing tradecraft, coupled with a plausible look at the inner life of a spy with a license to kill, will remind readers of the best of John le Carré.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Yogev Ben-Ari has been sent to St. Petersburg by the Mossad, ostensibly to network and set up business connections. His life is solitary, ordered, and lonely—until he meets Anna. Neither is quite what they seem to be, but while her identity may be mysterious, there is no doubt about the love they feel for each other. But the impassioned affair is not part of the Mossad plan. The agency must hatch a dark scheme to drive the lovers apart. Soon what began as a quiet, solitary mission becomes a perilous exercise in survival, and Ben-Ari has no time to discover the truth about Anna’s identity before his employers act . . . “The novel has a solid sense of intrigue and suspense, and its depiction of the world of international espionage feels accurate (as it should, since the author is a former Mossad agent). The characterizations are precise, too: these aren’t stick figures in a spy story but real people in a real environment. A nice blend of classic spy-novel conventions with a thoroughly contemporary setting.” —Booklist (starred review)

This book offers something entirely new: detailed scene-by-scene descriptions of the action and dancing of Giselle, Paquita, Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, and Raymonda, bringing the reader far closer to what the audience saw when the curtain went up on these five classic story ballets than has heretofore been possible. Drawing on archival documents, the authors show that these ballets were like today's pop entertainment: funnier, more violent, more spectacular, and with female characters far stronger than one might expect. This rigorously researched book fills huge gaps in dance history and is bound to be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and devotees of ballet and the arts.