Book worm
By John AndrewsMy recommendations so far have taken us to Madrid, India and Malaya but this month we are firmly back on English soil, anyhow for most of the book.
William Boyd has written many well-researched and exciting novels, two of his best being Brazzaville Beach and The New Confessions, but his latest effort, Restless, published this year in paperback by Bloomsbury, is a new departure in that it is his first Second World War spy thriller and a riveting tale of time and place.
Boyd is an accomplished master storyteller and the novel’s opening scenes, in the tranquil setting of the Cotswolds, do nothing to prepare the reader for the excitement to come.
Flashback then to 1939, on the outbreak of war, and we are introduced to Eva Delectorskaya, a beautiful Russian living in Paris who is recruited to the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, an enigmatic Englishman who teaches Eva to become the perfect spy.
Once fully trained, Eva is sent by Romer on several extremely dangerous missions, and it is the clever detailing of these assignments that gives the novel pace, as Eva struggles with the art of survival itself.
After the end of the war Eva goes to great lengths to rebuild her life as a typically English wife and mother, but feels the increasing need for one final assignment and in this she recklessly recruits her daughter.
My wife always complains that in reviewing books I give too much of the plot away, so Newsletter readers will have to get out there and embrace this closely-observed and enormously readable novel – but keep the ending to yourself