Restless

Restless

William Boyd

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

“I am Eva Delectorskaya,” Sally Gilmartin announces, and so on a warm summer afternoon in 1976 her daughter, Ruth, learns that everything she ever knew about her mother was a carefully constructed lie. Sally Gilmartin is a respectable English widow living in picturesque Cotswold village; Eva Delectorskaya was a rigorously trained World War II spy, a woman who carried fake passports and retreated to secret safe houses, a woman taught to lie and deceive, and above all, to never trust anyone. Three decades later the secrets of Sally’s past still haunt her. Someone is trying to kill her and at last she has decided to trust Ruth with her story. Ruth, meanwhile, is struggling to make sense of her own life as a young single mother with an unfinished graduate degree and escalating dependence on alcohol. She is drawn deeper and deeper into the astonishing events of her mother’s past—the mysterious death of Eva’s beloved brother, her work in New York City manipulating the press in order to shift public sentiment toward American involvement in the war, and her dangerous romantic entanglement. Now Sally wants to find the man who recruited her for the secret service, and she needs Ruth’s help. Restless is a brilliant espionage book and a vivid portrait of the life of a female spy. Full of tension and drama, and based on a remarkable chapter of Anglo-American history, this is fiction at its finest.


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  • chantaal
    Jan 20, 2025
    Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

    Picked this up after hearing my girl Hayley Atwell was going to play Eva, and I actually enjoyed it. 1940s spies is a genre I haven't really dug into yet, and this was enough to get me interested.

    Half of the novel focuses more on Eva's development than true spy stuff (she was a spy, but not the sort you immediately think of when you hear the word), but I liked the glimpse of the sort of work they could have (or did? My knowledge of spy history in the 40s is nil) been doing back then.

    The other half focused on Eva's daughter, Ruth, learning about her past, and that was less entertaining. Half the subplots could have been dropped from Ruth's half and still been entertaining - as the TV series has proven.

    If you're looking for a soft intro to the 1940s spy world, then I'd say give this a try.

    And imagine Hayley Atwell's adorable face as Eva to make it ten times better.

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  • tmelting
    Apr 02, 2025
    Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

    This was a fun, fast paced spy book. Lots of twist and turns but not hard to follow. It switches between the story of Eva's daughter in present day ('70s) and the story of Eva spying during world world II.

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