Restless is a brilliant espionage book and a vivid portrait of the life of a female spy.
Now Sally wants to find the man who recruited her for the secret service, and she needs Ruth’s help. She is drawn deeper and deeper into the astonishing events of her mother’s past-the mysterious death of Eva’s beloved brother, her work in New York City manipulating the press in order to shift public sentiment toward American involvement in the war, and her dangerous romantic entanglement. Ruth, meanwhile, is struggling to make sense of her own life as a young single mother with an unfinished graduate degree and escalating dependence on alcohol. Someone is trying to kill her and at last she has decided to trust Ruth with her story. Three decades later the secrets of Sally’s past still haunt her. Sally Gilmartin is a respectable English widow living in picturesque Cotswold village Eva Delectorskaya was a rigorously trained World War II spy, a woman who carried fake passports and retreated to secret safe houses, a woman taught to lie and deceive, and above all, to never trust anyone. (Oct.“I am Eva Delectorskaya,” Sally Gilmartin announces, and so on a warm summer afternoon in 1976 her daughter, Ruth, learns that everything she ever knew about her mother was a carefully constructed lie. But the real story is Eva/Sally's, a vividly drawn portrait of a minor figure in spydom caught up in the epic events leading up to WWII.
The contemporary narrative achieves a good deal more urgency when Ruth's mother recruits her to hunt down the reclusive, elusive Romer. Ruth's more pedestrian existence can't really compete with her mother's dramatic revelations. This fascinating story is well told, but slightly undercut by Ruth's less-than-dramatic life as a single mother teaching English at Oxford while pursuing a graduate degree in history. Sally, née Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigré living in Paris in 1939, was recruited as a spy by Lucas Romer, the head of a secretive propaganda group called British Security Coordination, to help get America into the war. When Ruth Gilmartin learns the true identity-and the WWII profession-of her aging mother, Sally Gilmartin, at the start of Boyd's elegant ninth novel (after Any Human Heart
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