Zachariah and Rachel are as star-crossed as two lovers can be. Rachel is the cherished daughter of a Russian family living in London--the artistic, mysterious Wolffs; Zach is her parents' adopted son who arrived from the orphanage with one sweater and a head full of curls and immediately stole Rachel's heart. As children, they became inseparable. But when they crossed a forbidden line, there was no going back. Now, as an adult, coping with her father's censure, Rachel decides to invent an ancestral history for her beloved: from a tavern-educated boxer in Dickensian times, to a Hussar at the Battle of Borodino during the Napoleonic Wars. Even as their real-life problems threaten to invade their imagined world, the threads of Rachel's story spin faster and faster. Filled with art and science, fairy tales and folk songs, tsars and foundlings, Be My Wolff is a wondrous, funny and tragic tale of astonishing beauty.