Ruth, given her mother’s story in alternate chapters, is at first disbelieving, then suspicious, before being caught up in a web of intrigue woven by a woman as clever as Scheherazade. Restless is a novel of slowly gathering power and unforgettable imagery. So why is it that now, in 1976, she wants her daughter to find Lucas and confront him? Eva and Lucas become lovers, although Ruth knows he is not her father.

When Ruth Gilmartin learns the true identityand the WWII professionof her aging mother, Sally Gilmartin, at the. Taught to lie, never to trust, always to have a safe house and to memorise whatever she needs to, she does so well that before long the secret counter-intelligence unit is sent to America to try and draw it into the War. Bloomsbury, 24.95 (324pp) ISBN 978-1-59691-236-6. Beautiful Eva soon turns out to be a dab hand at disseminating disinformation through the press. He tells her that if she works for him, he will get her an English passport. Sally is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian recruited as a spy just before the Second World War by the suave and rather sinister Lucas Romer. Ruth, an irritable single mother and Oxford graduate who is wasting her life teaching English as a second language, has always been told by her own mother, Sally, that ‘One day someone will come and kill me and then you’ll be sorry.’ This threat turns out to be true. Restless is that rare pleasure, a story that grips you from the first page and doesn’t let go until the last. If you ally habit such a referred Restless William Boyd book that will come up with the money for you worth, get the certainly best seller from us currently.

Was it the unappealing Armadillo, or the tedious Nat Tate, or the self-indulgent essays in Bamboo? At any rate, Boyd is back with a new publisher, a new novel and his old form.

Somehow, I don’t know how, I stopped reading William Boyd over the past decade.

Restless by William Boyd