I understood for the first time during perestroika what it must have been like in Russia's February Revolution … when, as participants remembered, everything seemed possible and the barriers and lack of trust that normally divide people from each other miraculously disappeared.

In April 1989, on a flight from New York to Texas, Sheila Fitzpatrick, an Australian historian of the Soviet Union, met Misha Danos, a Latvian-born physicist working in Washington DC. It was a year of revolutions in the USSR, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall in November – an extraordinary time to be a Sovietologist – but 1989 proved equally seismic in Fitzpatrick's private life. Unexpectedly but joyfully, she and Misha were soon partners in an “improbably happy marriage”.

In this exceptional memoir, written with searching honesty and self-awareness, Fitzpatrick revisits the years she spent with the deep-thinking and forthright Misha before his untimely death in 1999, and his lasting effect on her. This is also a book about the Cold War – how it came to an end, how that felt and what emerged to fill the void it left behind. It is a deeply personal exploration of the politics of change and rebirth, of old and new ways of thinking, and of the lessons we learn amid the swirl of life.