RestlessRestless
Title rated 3.95 out of 5 stars, based on 119 ratings(119 ratings)
Book, 2006
Current format, Book, 2006, , All copies in use.Book, 2006
Current format, Book, 2006, , All copies in use. Offered in 0 more formatsRandom House Canada proudly welcomes William Boyd to our fiction list with a riveting espionage novel that has a supremely human twist -- as domestic secrets turn out to be as potent as secrets of state. It is Paris 1939. Twenty-eight-year-old Eva Delctorskaya is at the funeral of her murdered younger brother when she notices a stranger standing among her family and friends. A patrician-looking Englishman with a secretive air and a persuasive manner, his name is Lucas Romer, and it turns out he has a mysterious connection to her brother. Romer recruits Eva and soon she is travelling 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, 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 in her past. This time, though, she can't do it alone -- she needs Ruth's help. Restless is a haunting portrait of a spy, and a masterful examination of the tensions between mothers and daughters. Full of drama, emotion and history, the novel represents storytelling at its finest. When I was a child and was being fractious and contrary and generally behaving badly, my mother used to rebuke me by saying: "One day someone will come and kill me and then you'll be sorry;" or, "They'll appear out of the blue and whisk me away -- how would you like that?;" or, "You'll wake up one morning and I'll be gone. Disappeared. You wait and see." It's curious, but you don't think seriously about these remarks when you're young. But now -- as I look back on the events of that interminable hot summer of 1976, that summer when England reeled, gasping for breath, poleaxed by the unending heat -- now I know what my mother was talking about: I understand that bitter dark current of fear that flowed beneath the placid surface of her ordinary life -- how it had never left her even after years of peaceful, unexceptionable living. I now realize she was always frightened that someone was going to come and kill her. And she had good reason. --From Restless
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- [Toronto] : Random House Canada, c2006.
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