Kathleen ffrench lived a storybook life, a life of opulence in a world on the brink of destruction. The headstrong child of an Irish diplomat and a Russian heiress, she grew up on her family's estates by the Volga, touring the capitals of Europe with barons and princesses, and visiting a home away from home: her father's castle in Galway. In the 1917 Russian Revolution she was lucky to survive peasant uprisings and the brutality of Bolshevik prisons. Later she travelled to Eastern Siberia where she spent months searching for her missing lover. Drawing on the candid letters of Kathleen and her family, Jean Lombard's deeply personal insights take readers into a vanished world, where the colourful people we meet are surprisingly like our own.