We the Living portrays the impact of the Russian Revolution on three people who demand the right to live their own lives. At its center is a girl whose passionate love is her fortress against the cruelty and oppression of a totalitarian state. Of this book, Ayn Rand said, “it is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write. The plot is invented, the background is not. I was born in Russia, I was educated under the Soviets; I have seen the conditions...

Nina, a young girl unsure of her role in her communist society, befriends a dog from her father's lab named Laika, who dreams of finding a home.

In September 1949 Jacqueline Bouvier arrives in postwar Paris to begin her junior year abroad. She's twenty years old, socially poised but financially precarious, and all too aware of her mother's expectations that she make a brilliant match. Before relenting to family pressure, she has one year to herself far away from sleepy Vassar College and the rigid social circles of New York, a year to explore and absorb the luminous beauty of the City of Light....