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Restless

William Boyd

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Dec 31, 2024 Michael Martz rated it it was amazing

Shelves: best-of-year

I can't even describe how much I enjoyed this book. When a fine writer like William Boyd pens an espionage novel and nails it, it's magic for me.

Eva Delectorskaya (let's call her Eva from this point....) was a young Russian woman recruited in the late 1930's as a spy for England after her brother's murder. Her Svengali was Lucas Romer, an English patrician building a team that is a bit out of the ordinary as WWII cranks up. "Restless" is the story that Eva (and her various other pseudonyms) pain ...more

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Aug 29, 2020 Lindsay Mouat rated it really liked it

One of my favourite reads of the year, simply enjoyable throughout. Yet 4 stars? It's one of those times where you wish Goodreads would offer half-stars as this a 4.5. Very good, especially of the spy genre, without necessarily being great.

Opening in pre-WW2 Paris, a young woman is recruited by the British secret service. The story is told through both past (the war itself) and the present (early 1970s) through two generations, from Britain under siege to the quiet depths of Oxfordshire.

Moving ...more

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Apr 06, 2014 Tim Adler rated it it was amazing

As a would-be thriler writer myself, RESTLESS is the paragon to which I aspire. It's like watching a concert pianist playing the piano -- you marvel at his descriptive talent, how, as a man, he really seems to get in the head of his heroine. The top note has to be the sequence in New Mexico where Eva is sent on a courier mission.

I first read the book on a transatlantic flight to Washington DC and was actually glad to wake up at some godforskaen hour with jetlag so I could get my nose into the n ...more

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