The true stories within Lara Prescott’s first novel, “The Secrets We Kept,” are by far the best thing about it. That’s saying a lot, because the job of weaving together bombshell espionage material long kept secret by the C.I.A. with the creation story of a now-dusty Russian novel and tartly-observed “Mad Men”-era feminism and sexual bigotry was tough. Prescott has managed to shape all of this into an above-average entry in the I-Knew-Hemingway genre.

“The Secrets We Kept” centers on Boris Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago,” about which you may know nothing, everything, the movie’s theme music or only how ravishing Omar Sharif and Julie Christie looked in the snow. Very few people approaching Prescott’s book are likely to know much about the “we” in its title. It refers not only to Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya — the devoted lover who was the main muse for Lara in “Zhivago,” and went to excruciating lengths to protect Pasternak — but to the book’s Greek chorus, the C.I.A.’s female typing pool. As you can see, there’s a lot going on here.

In 2014, the C.I.A. revealed an astonishing story about Pasternak and “Doctor Zhivago”: Once the manuscript had been spirited out of the Soviet Union at the behest of an enterprising Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the agency launched an operation to translate it from Italian back to Russian, print it in the tiniest possible editions and send it into Pasternak’s native land. The Soviets had banned it, sight unseen.

Years later, Nikita Khrushchev finally read it and expressed regret for that decision. “Better late than never,” he wrote about this change of heart.