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William Boyd

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Restless: A Novel Kindle Edition

by William Boyd (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 7,560 ratings

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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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When Ruth Gilmartin learns the true identityâand the WWII professionâof her aging mother, Sally Gilmartin, at the start of Boyd's elegant ninth novel (after Any Human Heart), Ruth is understandably surprised. Sally, nÃ©e Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian Ã©migrÃ© living in Paris in 1939, was recruited as a spy by Lucas Romer, the head of a secretive propaganda group called British Security Coordination, to help get America into the war. This fascinating story is well told, but slightly undercut by Ruth's less-than-dramatic life as a single mother teaching English at Oxford while pursuing a graduate degree in history. Ruth's more pedestrian existence can't really compete with her mother's dramatic revelations. The contemporary narrative achieves a good deal more urgency when Ruth's mother recruits her to hunt down the reclusive, elusive Romer. But the real story is Eva/Sally's, a vividly drawn portrait of a minor figure in spydom caught up in the epic events leading up to WWII. (Oct.)
Copyright Â© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

Boyd's ninth novel, an absorbing historical thriller, is loosely based on the history of a covert branch of British intelligence created to coax America into the Second World War. The story unfolds on parallel tracks as Sally Gilmartin, born Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian emigree recruited into the British Secret Service in 1939, reveals her clandestine past in an autobiography that she gives to her daughter, Ruth, a graduate student and single mother living a dull civilian life in Oxford in 1976. These installments give the narrative momentum (the accounts of Ruth's daily life drag, by contrast) as Eva describes the taciturn spy who recruited and trained her before becoming her lover; her secret propaganda work in New York; and the act of duplicity, almost deadly, that forced her to flee to England and live under an assumed identity. Ruth barely has time to process the shock of her mother's secret before she is swept into a dangerous game: finding her mother's betrayer before it's too late.
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Every critic agrees that William Boyd is a shamefully overlooked author on this side of the Atlantic. A powerful storyteller whose novels span genres and continents, Boyd often subtly ruminates on the thin line between private and public life. In Restless he fictionalizes a little-known moment of international espionage while using the conventions of spy thrillers to explore a generation gap. Critics roundly praise Sally's story. It's her daughter's story that's the trouble: a few reviewers find it sorely mismatched with the more dramatic elements of the book. A frequent prizewinner in England (including the Whitbread First Novel Award for A Good Man in Africa), Boyd has yet to catapult to the popularity of the Ian McEwans of the world. Whether Restless is the book to push him into wider renown is up for debate.

From Booklist

If an espionage thriller with terror tentacles reaching from pre-World War II to the present can be called a cozy, this is it. Boyd's latest novel moves back and forth from the heart of the British countryside and misty, romantic Edinburgh to prewar Paris and into various capitals during the conflict itself--all with a satisfying, Agatha Christie atmosphere. This is also a mother-daughter story set in 1976, with the daughter of an eccentric mother trying to figure out who wants to kill her mother, Sally Gilmartin. Boyd introduces a rather clunky literary device of having the mother give her daughter a manuscript that details her life as a WWII spy for the British Secret Service. Boyd's focus on Gilmartin's spy training and her behind-the-scenes propaganda work in New York to steer public opinion toward U.S. involvement in the war is fascinating. A somewhat clumsy narrative enlivened by some expertly generated suspense. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Praise for William Boyd:

"There's hardly a writer around whose work offers more pleasure and satisfaction." --Washington Post

"A champion storyteller. His prose style is intelligent, vigorous and pleasant." --New York Times Book Review

About the Author

William Boyd is the author of eight novels, including A Good Man in Africa and Any Human Heart, three collections of short stories, and twelve screenplays that have been filmed. He has been the recipient of several awards, including the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. He lives with his wife in London and southwest France.

From The Washington Post

Halfway through William Boyd's entertaining new novel, Restless, Ruth Gilmartin, a single mother living in Oxford, England, muses to herself, "People lead their real, most interesting lives under cover of secrecy." She has good reason to let her thoughts stray in this direction: She's recently discovered that almost everything she knows about her mother, the handsome and spirited 65-year-old British widow, Sally Gilmartin, is an elaborate and long-sustained lie.

For starters, Sally Gilmartin isn't even British. She was born in Moscow and after the Russian Revolution immigrated to France with her father and brother. Her real name is Eva Delectorskaya. In 1939, she was recruited by the British Secret Service and sent to Edinburgh to train. There she perfected her accent, learned an impressive array of mnemonic skills and practiced eluding a six-person team of trained shadows. She put these talents to good use as a British spy during the early years of World War II. Her espionage work was kept meticulously secret. It was also occasionally harrowing.

In 1942, she gave up her intelligence career and returned to Britain, where she married, settled down in Middle Aston and gave birth to Ruth. From this point on, she led an altogether unexceptional life. We learn of the surprising details of Eva's covert past, as Ruth does, in the form of a manuscript that Eva has prepared for her daughter. This manuscript forms half of Restless. The other half is narrated by Ruth Gilmartin and takes place in Oxford in the summer of 1976.

Boyd's primary challenge in this novel is to make both story lines compelling, and, largely, he does. Eva's story is certainly the more eventful one. When we think of World War II British espionage, we expect Eva to prowl the secret corridors of Vichy France or Nazi-occupied Poland. But Boyd sends Eva to a more unexpected and ultimately more interesting destination: America. In upstate New York, Eva works for a group of spies tied to the British Security Coordination. The goal of the BSC is to plant pro-British propaganda in newspapers throughout the world to spur the U.S. government -- and a largely isolationist American population -- into fighting against the Germans. Wars, as we know all too well, are often set in motion on the basis of manipulated intelligence, and Boyd has drawn upon recently revealed historical documents that describe a British spy presence in America of surprising scale and manipulative power.

Of course, there's little in daughter Ruth's life of comparable danger and magnitude. But this doesn't mean that the alternating chapters about her are dull. For one thing, Ruth is an engaging and nicely realized presence. She has her own full existence: a young son, a messy romantic life, unwanted houseguests, a PhD dissertation to finish, a job teaching English as a second language that brings an interesting array of foreign nationals into her Oxford apartment. All these facets are rendered succinctly and skillfully. Perhaps more important, we recognize in Ruth a stubbornness and strength handed down from Eva, who, because of the veiled nature of her spy career, hasn't always been as tender or forthcoming a mother as Ruth would have liked.

This is Boyd's eighth novel and 11th book of fiction, and he has earned a deservedly enthusiastic critical and popular following in Britain and beyond. His characters are vivid and human. He weds the engaging personal lives of his characters to diverse and far-reaching episodes of 20th-century history in a way that feels simultaneously accurate and intimate.

But Restless doesn't have the depth and gravity of the very best spy literature. To reveal Eva's secret life in a self-penned (though expertly polished) manuscript is a somewhat creaky device, and Boyd doesn't always slow down long enough to articulate Eva's complex motivations for sacrificing her safety and integrity for a country not even her own. Still, Restless is a gripping and smartly crafted spy thriller set against a fascinating and largely hidden episode in U.S.-British relations. By this measure, the book is an absorbing success.

Reviewed by John Dalton
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From AudioFile

Rosamund Pike's transitions are seamless as she brings together an aging mother's revealing memoir and a plot of revenge involving both the mother and her daughter. Pike's muted tones reflect the puzzlement of daughter Ruth as she discovers that her mother, Sally Gilmartin, was actually Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian migr, who became Eve Dalton, a spy for the British Secret Service in 1939. Pike's serene account captures Sally's habits of calm watchfulness, learned early and practiced throughout her life as she is caught up in intrigues that challenge her age, intelligence, and training. Most troubling are residual worries that trouble Eve long after she escapes the Secret Service and that make her daughter, and listeners, wonder if her restlessness is inescapable. S.W. 2007 Audies Award Finalist © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B002VQ7PVS
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury USA; 1st edition (May 20, 2009)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 20, 2009
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2809 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 337 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #153,751 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #744 in Historical Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Fiction
- #886 in U.S. Historical Fiction
- #1,074 in Espionage Thrillers (Kindle Store)

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4.3 7,560 ratings

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William Boyd

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WILLIAM BOYD has received world-wide acclaim for his novels which have been translated into over thirty languages. They are: A Good Man in Africa (1981, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize) An Ice Cream War (1982, shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Stars and Bars (1984), The New Confessions (1987), Brazzaville Beach (1990, winner of the McVitie Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) The Blue Afternoon (1993, winner of the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, 1995), Armadillo (1998) and Any Human Heart (2002, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet). His novels and stories have been published around the world and have been translated into over thirty languages. He is also the author of a collection of screenplays and a memoir of his schooldays, School Ties (1985); three collections of short stories: On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Nathalie 'X' (1995) and Fascination (2004). He also wrote the speculative memoir Nat Tate: an American Artist -- the publication of which, in the spring of 1998, caused something of a stir on both sides of the Atlantic. A collection of his non-fiction writings, 1978-2004, entitled Bamboo, was published in October 2005. His ninth novel, Restless, was published in September 2006 (Costa Book Award, Novel of the Year 2006) followed by, Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009), Waiting for Sunrise (2012), Solo (a James Bond novel – 2013) and Sweet Caress (2015). His fourth collection of short stories entitled The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth appeared in 2017. His fifteenth novel, Love is Blind, was published in September 2018. Trio, appeared in October 2020 and his seventeeth novel, The Romantic was published in 2022. The Mirror and the Road: Conversations with William Boyd (edited by Alistair Owen) was published in 2023.

Born in Accra, Ghana, in 1952, Boyd grew up there and in Nigeria. He was educated at Gordonstoun School and attended the universities of Nice (Diploma of French Studies) and Glasgow (M.A.Hons in English and Philosophy) and Jesus College, Oxford, where he studied for a D.Phil in English Literature. He was also a lecturer in English Literature at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, from 1980-83. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has been presented with honorary Doctorates in Literature from the universities of St. Andrews, Stirling, Glasgow and Dundee. In 2005 he was awarded the CBE.

His many screenwriting credits include Stars and Bars (1987, dir. Pat O'Connor), Mr Johnson (1990, dir. Bruce Beresford), Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1990, dir. Jon Amiel), Chaplin (1992, dir. Richard Attenborough) A Good Man in Africa (1993, dir. Bruce Beresford), The Trench (1999, which Boyd also directed) and Man to Man (2005, dir. Régis Wargnier). He adapted Evelyn Waugh's Scoop for television (1988) and also Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy (2001). His own three-part adaptation of his novel Armadillo was screened on BBC 1 in 2001 as was his adaptation of his novel Restless (2012). His film about Shakespeare and his sonnets -- A Waste of Shame -- was made in 2005 for BBC 4. His 5-hour adaptation of his novel Any Human Heart (Channel 4 2010) won the BAFTA for “Best Series”. He has written two original TV films about boarding-school life in England -- Good and Bad at Games (1983) and Dutch Girls (1985). His six-hour Cold War spy thriller, Spy City (Miramax, ZDF) was broadcast and streaed internationally at the end of 2020.

Boyd also writes for the theatre. His first play was SIX PARTIES that premiered at the Cottesloe Theatre as part of the National Theatre’s New Connections series in 2009. This was followed by LONGING, in 2013, on the main stage at Hampstead Theatre, an adaptation of two short stories by Anton Chekhov. LONGING is currently playing in repertoire in St Petersburg, Russia, and in Tallinn, Estonia. THE ARGUMENT, a dark comedy, is his first play with a wholly contemporary setting. It was premiered at Hampstead Downstairs(2016) and has recently had a new production at the Theatre Royal Bath.

He is married and divides his time between London and South West France.

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LJR's View

Boyd enjoys a sweet spot. I'm happy to report that Restless

Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2015

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I happened upon this book and its author, William Boyd, through one of Amazon's book blasts where the company makes reading suggestions based on a customer's prior purchases. As it happens, I read about one novel for every ten non-fiction books and as Amazon correctly concluded when I read novels it is often a mystery/thriller preferably cast in the noir genre. The interwar period between WWI and WWII has always been fertile ground for noir writers and it is where Mr. Boyd enjoys a sweet spot.

I'm happy to report that Restless: A Novel did not disappoint. The prose is smooth, words effortlessly chosen, the characters sufficiently developed that you find yourself engrossed in the story from the get go. The story line is pretty straight forward, the narrator, a single mother in her late twenties living near Oxford in 1976, becomes concerned about some bizarre behaviors of her mother and this leads to discovering that the mother led another life prior to and during WWII as a member of an obscure news/propaganda cell within the larger British intelligence community. Each chapter switches from the story about the mother during the pre-war and war years to the current period 1976 where the main character is the narrator- daughter, an English tutor and Oxford PhD student who has a young son that she is raising as a single mother. The seeming artifice of running two parallel stories, each separated by thirty-five or more years in time, Mr. Boyd masterfully collapses into a satisfying and plausible denouement.

The brief on the story is as follows: The mother is actually of Russian not English decent and after her very beloved brother is mysteriously murdered as an agent for the government the mother finds herself being recruited by the very same agency to carry on the work of her now deceased brother. Therein starts the tale which covers the mother's development as an intelligence officer, her love affair with her boss, her relocation to NYC as part of the British effort to embroil the United States in the war, a dangerous assignment out west to New Mexico to further the disinformation campaign, and the ensuing climax that builds to a crescendo only for the war years to end, a bevy questions unanswered. But the story's not over.

That's as much as you're going to get from me. Read the book for yourself and then at it's conclusion ask yourself if your appetite has been whetted for another of Mr. Boyd's novels as has mine. The issue is, among Mr. Boyd's many other novels including award winners, is an encore to Restless: A Novel possible?

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Boyd always engages the reader

Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2019

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William Boyd is a writer with an eye. Almost everything he touches turns to video. In Restless he's researched the BSC - Britain's 1940-41 effort to influence and tilt America towards war and support of England. Lost now as the effort was overwhelmed by Pearl Harbor it is nonetheless a very real and provocative part of WWII.

The fiction is the story of Eva. A woman drawn into to work as a spy. The fictional narrative of her life at the time and the potential for subterfuge or outright betrayal lurk everywhere. She can never really trust her boss, superiors or colleagues. The trick and talent of Boyd is showing all the ways Eva can be betrayed while not losing the reader in countless potential outcomes.

The story is told half of Eva's war time experiences and half in 1976 where Eva is slowly revealing herself to her 28 year old daughter in hopes of unraveling part of the mystery of that period that may be coming back to haunt her.

As others have commented this has the potential to be small story when set against WWII. But it's well paced and authentic elements of suspense and drama. It's not quite a great story but it's very good and worth a read.

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David M. Giltinan

Part historical novel, part spy thriller - great story!

Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2008

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This book was phenomenal. I started it at 3 o' clock one afternoon and just read it straight through, skipping dinner until I finished it.

Ruth Gilmartin is a graduate student in history at Oxford, 28-year old single mother of a three-year old son. One hot Saturday in the summer of 1976 her world is turned upside down when her mother reveals that her identity as Sally Gilmartin (nee Fairchild) is an elaborately constructed fabrication. Turns out that Sally is actually Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian emigre recruited to the British Secret Service in 1939, after the murder of her brother, also a spy.

Ruth's and Eva's stories unfold in alternating chapters until they finally converge in a climax that will keep you riveted. One slight problem is that Eva's story is way more interesting, so that the chapters devoted to Ruth feel padded: there are some fairly obvious red herrings and a subplot that ends up going nowhere. But these are very minor flaws.

Terrific story, great characters, good writing - "Restless" delivers on all three levels. As other reviewers have pointed out, this book is a bit of a departure for Boyd - it's not quite his typical 'literary' novel. It's part historical novel, part spy thriller, executed with exceptional flair. Boyd is an extremely talented writer and this book surpasses even his previous excellent work.

I highly recommend "Restless".

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lovetoread

A somewhat sad, but thrilling, page turning story.

Reviewed in Brazil on September 24, 2023

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A somewhat sad, thrilling, page turning spy story.
Enjoyed it from start to finish. Novels like this one will always be welcome.

oferrall elizabeth

A gréât tead

Reviewed in Germany on March 4, 2024

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Loved this book, intriguing spy set up!

Poisonthewell

bon

Reviewed in Canada on March 21, 2019

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ok

Joker

Desperdicio de tiempo

Reviewed in Mexico on April 4, 2019

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Aun no he recibido el libro y lo pedí hace casi 4 meses. Pésimo. Lamentablemente no puedo calificar con 0 estrellas.

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steve Rowe

a classic spy thriller

Reviewed in Australia on September 30, 2022

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A bit slow in the middle but even after 3 readings I still rate it as a favourite. Like most authors , Boyd had written some pretty ordinary stuff (my opinion), possibly contractual, but this is an enduring classic.

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William Boyd

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