Restless: A Novel

Front Cover
Bloomsbury Publishing USA, May 20, 2009 - Fiction - 336 pages
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.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
11
Section 3
28
Section 4
41
Section 5
58
Section 6
68
Section 7
87
Section 8
91
Section 16
186
Section 17
190
Section 18
197
Section 19
215
Section 20
226
Section 21
254
Section 22
263
Section 23
276

Section 9
97
Section 10
107
Section 11
124
Section 12
141
Section 13
155
Section 14
160
Section 15
179
Section 24
282
Section 25
294
Section 26
313
Section 27
325
Section 28
326
Copyright

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About the author (2009)

William Boyd is the author of numerous novels, collections of short stories, and screenplays that have been filmed. His novels include Love is Blind; Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet; Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year; Sweet Caress; A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; and Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He lives in London and southwest France.

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