Restless

I liked this story with two women protagonists because of its drama. The book had me mesmerized from beginning to end. One reason may be that I listened to the audiobook with the actress Rosamund Pike as narrator. She knew how to portray all the accents, from the (male) aristocrat Lucas Romer to the young woman spy Eva Delectorskaya.

I liked the dual timeline, with Eva’s adult daughter learning about her mother’s shocking hidden past as it is slowly revealed. I like books about mother/daughter relationships, and this is one of the better ones in that regard. But what kept… show more.

I loved this brilliant espionage novel, inspired by real events during the Second World War.

William Boyd paints an authentic, dramatic, vivid portrait of the life of a female spy. Sally Gilmartin is living as a respectable widow in the picturesque English countryside. But decades before, during the war, she was Eva Delectorskaya.

As a rigorously trained spy, who carried fake passports and used safe houses, she was taught to lie and deceive, and above all, to never trust anyone. Now, in her later years, someone is trying to kill her, and she’s going to have to learn to trust… show more.

I am a huge fan of William Boyd. His writing never disappoints.

This spy thriller is no exception and features the best female name of all time in the form of Eva Delectorskaya. There are plenty of spy thrillers out there featuring incredible women and hooray for that but this one stands out for me for the quality of the writing, pace, and the character of Eva herself. 

This highly original spy thriller gripped me from the first page. It jumps between the 1970s and WW2, with locations in Britain, America, Paris, and Belgium. Ruth Gilmartin’s mother Sally, to all intents and purposes a sweet old lady living in a small English village, decides to reveal that she is in fact Eva Delectorskya, a Russian recruited by the British Secret Service, and she wants her daughter, a single mother teaching EFL, to help her find and take revenge on the double agent who sold her out decades before. The writing is tight and elegant, leaving lots of room… show more.