Be my Wolff

"Zachariah and Rachel Wolff are brother and sister. Well, not exactly. They are star-crossed lovers. Well, not exactly. Rachel is the cherished daughter born to a Russian family living in London, and Zachariah is her parents' adopted son, who arrived from the orphanage with one sweater, a head of rambunctious curls, and a dexterous set of fists, or fives, as he likes to call them. As children, they became as close as two people could be. But when they crossed this forbidden line, there was no going back. Now, as an adult, coping with Zach's estrangement from their formidable father, Rachel has set herself the task of inventing a family history for her beloved. And so the novel cartwheels through Zach's imagined ancestry--from a tavern-educated boxer in Dickensian times, to a Hussar at the Battle of Borodino during the Napoleonic Wars. All the while, Zach and Rachel's troubles in present-day Camden Town start to build to yet another point of no return. Filled with art and science, fairy tales and folk songs, tsars and foundlings, epic battles in the prize ring and on the Western Front, Be My Wolff is a novel of astonishing range and imagination: a love story, an exuberant adventure through time and place, a tale of the most unbreakable ties that bind"--