Restless

Local Description

2006. A trade paperback copy in good condition.

Description

A masterful, riveting espionage novel about a mother whose secret life as a WWII spy is at last revealed to her daughter. Full of tension and drama, emotion and history, this is storytelling at its finest by one of the great literary writers of his generation. Now a major TV movie adaptation by The Sundance Channel and the BBC starring Michelle Dockery, Michael Gambon, Charlotte Rampling, Hayley Atwell and Rufus Sewell. It is Paris, 1939. Twenty-eight year old Eva Delectorskaya is at the funeral of her beloved younger brother. Standing among her family and friends she notices a stranger. Lucas Romer is a patrician looking Englishman with a secretive air and a persuasive manner. He also has a mysterious connection to Kolia, Eva's murdered brother. Romer recruits Eva and soon she is traveling to Scotland to be trained as a spy and work for his underground network. After a successful covert operation in Belgium, she is sent to New York City, where she is involved in manipulating the press in order to shift American public sentiment toward getting involved in WWII.Three decades on and Eva has buried her dangerous history. She is now Sally Gilmartin, a respectable English widow, living in a picturesque Cotswold village. No one, not even her daughter Ruth, knows her real identity. But once a spy, always a spy. Sally has far too many secrets, and she has no one to trust. Before it is too late, she must confront the demons of her past. This time though she can't do it alone, she needs Ruth's help. Restless is a thrilling espionage novel set during the Second World War and a haunting portrait of a female spy.

Awards

Shortlisted for British Book Awards: Best Read of the Year 2007 and Independent Booksellers' Book of the Year Award: Adults' Book of the Year 2007.

Reviews

"The most accomplished storyteller of his generation.' Independent 'Boyd has an exceptional ability to tell a really compelling story, in dense imaginative detail, about characters with complex, and convincing, emotional lives.' Los Angeles Times Book Review 'Boyd has combined serious literary intent with an enviable talent for character, storytelling and humour.' Daily Express"

Author description

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana and was brought up there and in Nigeria. He was educated at Gordonstoun School and at the Universities of Nice, Glasgow and Oxford. Between 1980 and 1983 he was a lecturer in English literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford. He is the author of A Good Man in Africa, which won the Whitbread Literary Award for the Best First Novel in 1981 and a Somerset Maugham Award in 1982; On the Yankee Station (1982), a collection of short stories; An Ice-Cream War, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize for 1982 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Stars and Bars (1984); The New Confessions (1987); Brazzaville Beach, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1990 and for which William Boyd was awarded the McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year; The Blue Afternoon, which won the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award; The Destiny of Nathalie X, a further collection of short stories, and Any Human Heart. Eight of his screenplays have been filmed, the most recent of which is A Good Man in Africa, based on his first novel. Two television films about public school life, Good and Bad at Games and Dutch Girls, appear together in School Ties (1985). William Boyd is married and lives in London.